Letters in Geometrical Diagrams, Greek - Arabic - Latin
Paul Kunitzsch · 2022
The letters used in geometrical diagrams in ancient and medieval texts of mathematical content will pose no major problem for editors and students of such texts as long as the texts were originally composed in one language and the letters were consistently applied within the accompanying text. 1 The matter, however, becomes more complicated when more languages are involved. Many of the major classical texts have suffered extensive processes of transmission - from Greek into Arabic, partly through Syriac, and hence further into medieval Latin. It is therefore interesting to see how the diagram letters were treated in the successive translations and what rules can be derived from a comparative study of them for the edition and understanding of translated mathematical texts. 2 For this purpose, in the following paper a number of “big” diagrams, i. e. with many letters, have been selected from some of the major mathematical texts existing in all the three languages involved, Greek, Arabic and medieval Latin, in order to investigate the “methods” followed by the translators in the adaptation of the diagram letters and, if possible, to discover the system or systems of conversion employed by them.