利玛窦在汉语外来词上的贡献:“子午线”“经线”“纬线”等词语探源

Matteo Ricci’s Contribution to Chinese Loanwords:The Origin of Meridian,Longitude and Latitude

明末清初,意大利传教士利玛窦来华,在传播宗教的同时,也介绍了许多科学知识,引进了一些新概念。为表达这些新概念,利氏和他的中国合作者们创造了不少新词,如“子午线”“经线”“纬线”“经度”“纬度”等天文地理方面的术语名词,这些名词一直沿用至今。本文结合历史文献考证法、历史比较法等研究方法,通过对拉丁原典、中文译著和中国古籍中相关词汇的考证,探明“经线”“纬线”“子午线(环、圈)”“地平线”“经度”“纬度”等词语的来源及历史演变过程。

In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties,the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci came to China.He not only brought the Christian religion,but also Western science.At the same time,he also found that the Chinese people were very interested in the scientific knowledge he brought,so he came up with the idea of spreading religion by introducing scientific knowledge and putting it into practice.With the introduction of Western scientific knowledge,Ricci introduced some new concepts.In order to express these new concepts,he and his Chinese partners either infused new meanings into traditional Chinese characters,or created new Chinese words by means of the structure of Latin words such as meridian,longitude,latitude etc.,astronomical geography terms which are still in use until today.By combining the methods of textual research and historical comparison,this paper explores the origin and historical evolution of these terms through the textual research of the original Latin classics and related words in ancient Chinese books.