Arabic Origin of Scientific Terms Syed Amaar Ahmad Email: syed.a.ahmad@ieee.org * December 3, 2017 Abstract Modern science draws its vocabulary from Greco-Latin and Germanic languages. In this article, we show that over 100 stem words in these languages that are commonly used in scientific terminology, can also be traced to primitive Arabic. Our derivations use a set of formulae presented in a ground-breaking work in [1] that has remained obscure to contemporary philology researchers. These formulae are fairly simple and allow a large number of words from various languages to be traced to Arabic’s triliteral roots. Our derivations show that the association of these stems to primitive Arabic is well before 7 th century CE. 1 Introduction In 1895, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, India, made the remarkable claim in his treatise Minan-ur-Rahman that primitive Arabic was the mother language from which other languages emerged [2]. Nineteenth century German philologist Max M¨ uller had also hypoth- esized about a common human language [3]. More recent work by Quentin Atkinson, using analysis of more than 500 languages, indicates that they can all be traced back to a long- forgotten dialect spoken by human ancestors in Africa [4]. Achieving consensus on what the original language or dialect was has proven elusive though. Mainstream philologists do not view primitive Arabic a viable candidate as that original lan- guage. In fact, at the time of publication of Minan-ur-Rahman, Sanskrit had been hypothesized by some scholars as the candidate language due to being one of the oldest of Indo-European languages [1]. However, because the triliteral roots of Semitic languages and those of Indo- European languages were fundamentally different, it proved hard for mainstream philologists to see any connection between these two language groups. In the 1960s, a lesser known philologist M. A. Mazhar built upon the ideas in Minan-ur-Rahman and developed a significant set of rules and formulae that could enable the association of words from a diverse set of languages to Arabic triliteral roots [1]. His formulae exhibit algorith- mic simplicity which is all the more remarkable given that this work and the pioneering claim of Hazrat Ahmad have not been afforded due recognition by contemporary philologists. The broader methodology pursued in these works has been to demonstrate that (i) Arabic’s gram- matical structure is a superset of the structure in all other languages, and (ii) numerous words * The author received PhD in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2014. His interests include wireless networks, adaptive systems, applied information theory and linguistics. He is currently working as a Research & Development Engineer on vehicular crash avoidance through wireless communications in Metro-Detroit. 1