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Mr. Moore was trying to explain why do we use X for the unknown things, such as the X prize, the X file, Project X and else. He started a story about six years ago when he started to learn Arabic. He said that Arabic is a supremely logical language. Writing a phrase or a sentence in Arabic is like crafting equations, because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. This also one of the reasons so much of what people have thought of western science, mathematics, engineering was really worked out in the first few century of the common era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks. One of the examples is the little system in Arabic called Al-jebra which means the system for reconciling disparate parts. When it comes to English, it becomes Algebra.
As the story goes, Arabic texts that contain mathematical wisdoms finally came to Europe-let us say Spain. When they arrived there, there are so many interests in translating these wisdoms into European Language. The problem is that there are some sounds in Arabic that don’t exist in European box voices, also those very sounds tend to be represented by the characters that are available in European Languages.
One of the sample sounds is “syiin”, also the first letter to the word “syaiin” meaning something in English- something unknown. Differently in Arabic, to make this word definite, we can add the article “Al” in the beginning of it and it becomes the unknown thing.
The problem for Spanish scholars who were tasked to translate these materials is that in Spanish there is no sound like “sh”. So they borrow the Ck sound from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai. Later on, when these materials were translated into common European Language such as Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X and it formed the basis for mathematics textbook for almost 600 years.
So, why is that ‘X’ is the unknown? X is the unknown because you can’t say “Sh” in Spanish.