This article is from WeChat official account: SME Technology Story (ID: SMELab) , Author: SME, the original title: “do not let the road riding, electrical Regardless of gas, where do weird technological words come from? “, the head picture comes from: Visual China

Not long ago, the Beijing Cigezhuang Horse Road was officially opened, with a total length of 4.37 kilometers, allowing everyone to ride on horseback and experience the local horse culture of Cui Gezhuang.

In the news reports, this horse trail has the potential to become an online celebrity check-in site. Along the way, there are well-known scenic spots such as Heli Habitat Wetland and Red Brick Art Museum, passing through woodlands, parks, greenways, lakes, and wineries. , Rice fields, poplar forests, the natural scenery is panoramic.

Horse Road Horse Road, horse riding road, nothing wrong, but “Malu” has something to say, surnamed horse for so many years, until now there is no horse on the road, it is really hard to tell.

Just a few months ago, a young woman in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province rode a white horse on the road. There were three people in a group. Someone rode a horse, someone led a horse and someone took pictures. Surveillance video showed that the three people also ran through a red light, which had a certain impact on the traffic. Afterwards, the traffic police found the owner of the horse and punished and criticized him.

It is true that it is a requirement of modern transportation that horses cannot be used on the road. After all, once horses are frightened by passing vehicles, their behavior can easily cause damage to public safety.

However, since modern roads no longer allow horse riding, why are they still called roads, and shouldn’t they change with the times to a name that will not cause misunderstanding?

This question has to be said, can’t we use roads? According to the “Modern Chinese Dictionary”, there is a difference between roads and highways: Roads refer to wide and flat roads in cities or suburbs, and highways refer to roads where vehicles pass outside the urban area.

For a simpler and more straightforward example, we will say”Highway” instead of “high-speed road”, similarly, we will say “cross the road” instead of “crossing the road”, young couples who want to walk will say “press the road” instead of “press the highway.”

There is a view that the “road” in modern Chinese does not refer to the road on which carts and horses go, but refers to the road built by the method invented by the British John Macadan, referred to as “road”.

John Lawton Macadan invented a method of paving roads using gravel in the early 19th century. The large stones at the base layer provide greater bearing capacity for the pavement, and then smaller stones are used to pave the upper layer, and finally broken Stone or slag fills up the surface, and the road surface is higher than the ground surface, and water accumulation is not easy to occur in rainy days.

This method of road construction quickly proved to be of outstanding practicality. John Macadan also wrote two standards and specifications for the construction of modern roads, so this gravel road was quickly promoted.

Until the end of the 19th century, the construction of most major roads in Europe was affected by Macadan, and many “Macadan Roads” were also built in North America. Considering that after 1840, Western powers built the first batch of new roads in the Chinese concessions, it seems reasonable that “malu” refers to “Macadan Road”.

Although the conclusion is surprising and the effect is in line with the reversal style of the modern Internet, the “Macadan Road” can’t stand the test.

First of all, the term “malu” has appeared very early, and it was first seen in “Zuo Zhuan·Twenty Years of Zhaogong”: “Master Yu Shen Yugong went to the street of the road, so he followed.” And its meaning has been. It is an avenue for carriages.

A horse-riding road in the old Beijing city in the late Qing Dynasty

In the Qing Dynasty, roads can be divided into official roads, big roads, and roads. The meaning of roads at this time is already the meaning of urban streets. During the period from the end of Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, the roads built by the Chinese using new road construction methods were generally called “”Car road” was later changed to “highway”, which means that the western imported technology is actually the “road” branch.

Furthermore, new-style roads are named after people’s names and conform to Chinese laws, which are easy to confuse with place names. We can describe these new foreign things in Chinese, such as railways, gravel roads, and asphalt roads.

In short, the road may have been given new content after the Industrial Revolution, but its basic meaning has not changed much since ancient times. It is an avenue for transportation, and there is no need to be far-fetched.

The road used to be able to race horses, but the times have changed it into what it is today, but what does electricity have to do with air? ?

The term electrical is not as common as the road, but as long as you have a background in science and engineering, you must have heard terms such as electrical engineering and electrification. If you look up the dictionary, you will get “a way to use electricity to generate energy “explanation of.

Electrical Engineering Textbook

So what about “gas”? I am afraid that even many people who study electrical related majors do not know where the gas of electrical comes from?

Compared with the previous road, the direction of the source of the refined electric is relatively clear. It is likely to be a new thing introduced into China after the industrial revolution. You may be rewarded by looking at its source.

When we associate the industrial revolution with gas, it is easy to think of the steam engine, because before the advent of electricity and internal combustion engines, the steam engine was the most mainstream power source. Could it be that the electric motor and the steam engine have a certain similarity? The combination of electricity and gas forms a new word.

From the original English word “electricity”, we can’t find any meaning related to steam “steam”. If the Chinese people would add it by themselves, it would definitely not lose three points of water.

In fact, the research on electricity both in China and the West predates the invention of the steam engine. The earliest recorded steam engine prototype came from the pressure cooker of the French physicist Papin. The high-pressure steam that spurted out inspired him. It was in 1679.

Paping and his pressure cooker invented

In 1600, British physicist Gilbert had discovered that some objects can attract light objects such as rice husks after friction. He called this type of object electrica and wrote it in his book “Magnet On” in.

Further on, British doctor and writer Brown called this phenomenon of attraction after friction and the principle behind it collectively as electricity, which still predates the invention of the steam engine.

Therefore, electricity should not come from the original English, but was created in the process of translation. If it does not conform to the grammar of Chinese, is it possible that our neighboring country first translated it?

Maybe many people know that in modern times, to be precise, after the Sino-Japanese War of Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, Japan used Chinese characters to translate a large number of Western words, and many of them were introduced into China and used by us.

We have become accustomed to some of these usages, especially the suffixes in the field of science, such as “transformation, style, inflammation, force, sex, nature, boundary, type, sense, point, view, line, theory, rate, method “Is the word formation of the suffix.

Hezhi Chinese

Including intelligence, appendicitis, heart rate, visibility, volatility, including our protagonist “Electrification”. This affixation comes from English, but Japanese also has a great influence on modern Chinese.

Back to the term electrical, does it come from a Japanese translation? In modern Japanese, the term “Electricity” is widely used, such as the University of Electro-Communications and Electric Railway.

According to Lei Yinzhao’s textual research in the “Etymology of “Electricity”,” the electricity did not come from Japan at the first time, but came from a piece by the American missionary Ma Gaotian.(Daniel Jerome MacGowan) The Book of Natural History, translated in 1851.

Ma Gaofu first used the “electric standard” to refer to the telegraph in the book, and then “electric secret machines”, “electric fans”, “electric alarm clocks” and “electric lights” appeared in the circle of missionaries to China. Such words.

The missionaries who came to China have translated a lot of works related to science and technology in modern times. For some new vocabulary, they will refer to similar expressions that already existed in Chinese. Take electricity as an example. The earliest electricity recognized by the Chinese is from lightning. The ancients believed that electricity was produced by the combination of yin and yang, while qi was the source of the movement and changes of all things in nature, including electromagneticphenomenon.

In the “Lun Heng” of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Wang Yun used the concept of Qi to explain the attraction of frictional electrification and the attraction of magnets and iron needles. He pointed out that only objects with the same nature of Qi can induce mutual induction.

This kind of philosophical point of view is somewhat similar to the earlier electrical theories. Western scholars have also proposed the fluid hypothesis of electricity. In the process of translation, Ma Gaotai may use Chinese character gas to correspond to English fluid (fluid).

The most famous is the “Chemical Jianyuan” interpreted by Franya and written by Xu Shou, which set the rules of “Chinese character naming” for elements, and the modern meaning of “hygiene” was born at that time.

Japan began to absorb Western culture after the “Black Boat Incident”. Of course, it also borrowed a large number of Chinese and Western books from China. The most complete existing “Bo Wu Tong Shu” may be the manuscript in Japan.

Therefore, electricity is an imported science. The term “electricity” was born through the translation of missionaries to China. It has a profound impact on today’s academics. I hope that all students studying electrical related majors can introduce themselves to others I can also tell such a story when I am a professional.

Reference materials:

Wang Wei, Song Jing, Wang Liman. On the Chinese translation methods of modern Japanese technology vocabulary and its influence on the Chinese system[J].Japanese Language Teaching and Japanese Studies,2015 (00):44-54.

Xia Jing. The translation of science and technology terms in the late Qing Dynasty[D]. Wuhan University, 2012.

Tong Xiaolin. A New Probe into the Etymology of “Ma Lu”[J].Journal of Shangqiu Normal University,2011,27(08):104-106.

Lei Yinzhao. The etymology of “electricity”[J].Transactions of the Chinese Society of Electrical Engineering,2007(04):1-7.

This article is from WeChat official account:none SME Science and Technology Story (ID: SMELab), Author: SME