On the way to India

I’m off to give a talk in Bangalore and then visit Chennai and Mumbai. In his delightful book called The Argumentative Indian Amrtya Sen writes

A good example is the transformation of Âryabhat’s Sanskrit term jya … [which] was translated, through proximity of sound, into Arabic jiba (a meaningless word in Arabic) and later transformed into jaib (a bay or a cove in Arabic), and ultimately into the Latin word sinus (meaning a bay or cove) , from which the modern term sine is derived. Âryabhat’s jya was translated in Chinese as ming and was used in such tables as yue jianlian ming, literally “sine of lunar intervals”.

Is that amazing or what?