Ambiguities of Several Chinese Mathematical Vocabularies

Abstract

AbstractMathematics in the Chinese school system is widely viewed as a subject or curriculum for studying quantitative relations and spatial forms of science. In teaching and learning the mathematics curriculum, mathematical terms often appear which are indispensable for carrying the historical humanities of mathematics courses. Mathematical terms in the Chinese mathematics curriculum are represented as the characters, words and phrases that refer to or define certain kind of mathematical objects. However, the ambiguity and the transformation of some metaphorical meaning of mathematical terms will hinder students from understanding related mathematical concepts. In addition, the humanistic factors and culture involved in those mathematical terms also benefit students’ understanding of mathematics. In teaching and learning mathematics in primary schools, teachers and students have raised many curious questions about the metaphorical meanings of mathematical terms. For example, why do we use “和”(/hé/, and) instead of “合”(/hé/, unify) to refer to the result of addition? Does the “底(/dǐ/,base)” of a triangle have to be at the bottom? In the Chinese mathematical curriculum, mathematical terms are usually named by predecessors or translated from other language. The meaning of these terms has gone through a long period of history, and the original meaning of these characters, words and phrases may have changed today. Metaphor is a language phenomenon in the field of linguistics. Actually, mathematical terms just indicate the mathematics objects whose mathematical meanings are the metaphor of general meaning. The main purpose of this paper is to make the metaphorical mapping between the two meanings make sense through several cases studies, so as to enrich the historical humanities in the mathematics curriculum. The process of mathematical cognition should not only establish contact with the context of daily life but also communicate with the context of history, languages, traditional culture as well as the thought of predecessors.KeywordsChinese languageMathematical curriculumMetaphorAmbiguity