ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Ricci’s achievements in creating geometrical terms. These achievements include the terms coined by Ricci and his collaborator Xú Guāngqǐ 徐光啓 (1562–1633); their word-making methods, namely, the creation of form-borrowing terminology for all of the paraphrasing geometrical terms; the new meanings given to glyphs of existing Chinese words; M-H (Modifier-Head) terms; and categorization and analogies. From the cognitive point of view, we can see that the geometrical terms coined by Matteo Ricci and Xú Guāngqǐ were created from a translational point of view to imitate the structure of the Latin word. The first Chinese character, and sometimes additional characters as well, correspond to a modified part of the original Latin word, while the next character or more correspond to the species. This way of creating words is quite productive and maintains a high degree of uniformity in terminology. Ricci contributed a number of geometrical terms to Chinese, mainly in the mathematical works he translated in collaboration with Xú Guāngqǐ – especially Jǐhé yuánběn 幾何原本 [Euclid’s Elements]. Most of these terms are still used in modern Chinese, demonstrating how successful Ricci’s coinage of geometrical terminology was.
