Posted: Oct 23, 2012 1:17 pm
Corneel wrote:
English itself did in large part not have the words for those concepts but borrowed them wholesale from other languages (Greek and Latin mainly). And nothing stops people to do the same (as most languages did) or invent words in their own language, as in Dutch (thanks to Simon Stevin we have a whole list of translated words for mathematical concepts rather than the classical language derived terms found in other many other European languages).
Okay, but the problem seems to be that some words are difficult to understand in other languages, such that their meaning is evasive. In these instances, adding new words to the language would be problematical. I wondered whether some mathematical concepts might suffer the same fate for particular languages. I really don't know... I'm just chewing the fat.
BTW I don't think velocity and time can be considered mathematical concepts, they're physical concepts.
If that were the case, I don't see how maths would be able to incorporate such concepts into mathematical equations. That is the sense in which I categorise them as mathematical concepts. Other abstract concepts, such as love, freedom, justice, hatred, cannot be incorporated into mathematical equations; so I don't think that the ontology of a concept determines whether it is mathematical or not.