中国古代矿物名称起源浅议

本文讨论我国古代命名的,或翻译的,目前我国现代矿物学中仍然使用的一些主要的无机固态矿物名称的起源问题。说明我国古代人民为创立和丰富矿物学知识作出了卓越的贡献。

A Simple Discussion on the Orioin of Mineral Term in Ancient China

The sources of mineral terms used in contemporary mineralogy in China fall into two types: translated terms and named terms by the Chinese. This paper discusses the origins of some majorn inorganic solid mineral terms named by ancient Ohinese, or translated from foreign languages, which are still in use in contemporary mineralogy. The literatures recorded minerals in China are age-old and vast, aproximately three hundred kinds of minerals that had been reeordeded until the Qing Dynasty with thousands of terms. Among them, more than sixty inorganic solid mineral basic terms are still in use today. This paper inquires into the causes why a mineral has several terms and why one term stands for several minerals, and, the origins of the structures and the suffixes of mineral terms, and the methods which the ancient chinese employed in founding and translating mineral terms. The writer, with reference to amounts of data from our ancestors, traces back to the origins of mineral terms. This certainly is of practical significance for us to study the ways in which the Chinese discover, distinguish, employ and name minerals, so as to evaluate accurately the contribution of ancient Chinese in founding, enriching and developing the knowledge of mineralogy.