Talk:平方

Etymology

@Justinrleung, Tooironic, Mar vin kaiser, 沈澄心, RcAlex36, Suzukaze-c, Frigoris, any others -- the Japanese term appears in the 1870s, around the time of active w:Rangaku, which included the coinage of new terms using kanji, and the repurposing of existing Chinese terms to express new senses.

Our Chinese entry for 平方 (píngfāng) only lists a few pronunciations. Is this just because no one has added the others yet? Or might this term have been coined in Japanese in the late 1800s, and 平方 (píngfāng) is only a (relatively) recent addition to the Chinese lexicon?

Curious, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:29, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Like most of the Chinese lexicon that emerged during the advent of modernity the etymology is unclear, unless you're willing to sift through any peer-reviewed linguistics research available. ---> Tooironic (talk) 02:20, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

@Eirikr: In traditional Chinese way of teaching arithmetic, there was an emphasis on 開方／开方 (kāifāng, “to take the square root”), and I don't think 平方 (píngfāng) was in active use if ever. To describe <unit of length squared> as a unit of area, they'd use something like 積 before the <unit of length>, but such usage appeared only for the process of calculation. In real world people most often just used special-purpose area units such as 畝. The process of multiplicating something by itself was literally 自相乘 = to self-multiply. --Frigoris (talk) 08:01, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

@Eirikr: By the way, the number of dialectal pronunciations in an entry has nothing to do with whether it's a new coinage or not. In fact, those new technical terms are often the sole term used in all Chinese dialects like 電話. --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 09:59, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

@Mar vin kaiser, RcAlex36: Granted. Logically, I came to two likely reasons a given ZH entry might only have a few dialectal pronunciations given: 1) the EN Wikt editor community just hasn't added them yet, or 2) it's a rare term that might not have much currency. For Door #2, one of the possible reasons for rarity could be coinage or meaning shift outside of China. I was curious what our ZH editors might know.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:48, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

@Eirikr: In Chinese, words are often borrowed from the formal written language into dialects. You can consider this a form of orthographic borrowing. RcAlex36 (talk) 11:27, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

@All: Thank you everyone for your input! It sounds like the existence of 平方 in written Chinese prior to the 1870s is unknown at present. I'll tweak the JA etymology to be more clearly speculative than definitive. Cheers! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:48, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Oh, you're in luck, I tried to google this word using Chinese sources, and I found an essay written in 1774 entitled "登泰山記" written by Yao Nai, and it uses this word. Though I'm not sure if it means exactly the modern mathematical connotation we know. The quotation is "石蒼黑色，多平方". It's in literary Chinese. --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 11:14, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Reading the actual essay, it sounds like it's referring to the landscape of Mount Tai, something like "lots of flat sides". --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 11:16, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

• Thank you @Mar vin kaiser! So the word 平方 apparently existed earlier, at least graphemically speaking. I think the current wording for the JA etymology loosely covers that, but if you think it needs adjustment to better account for your findings, by all means please have a go.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:42, 22 June 2021 (UTC)