ENGLISH AND SLOVAK CONCEPT SYSTEMS OF WHOLE NUMBERS

Abstract

Terminology documents the knowledge of various subject fields. The paper describes the structure ofknowledge and models the conceptual systems of ordinal numbers in English and Slovak language. In the theory ofterminology, the designation can be expressed by a term, a symbol, and an appellation. Worth noticing is the factthat in the case of mathematical sciences, in algebra, both two types of designations are used, i.e., by a term andpredominantly by a symbol. Mathematical science is precise and systemic. That is the reason why designation by thesymbol is largely used in practice. An additional asset is that this type of designation is understandable across almostall languages and has an international character. It avoids ambiguation and misunderstandings. Moreover, thesymbol saves time and is more economical. The paper focuses on bilingual conceptual systems of ordinal numbers.Conceptual systems facilitate understanding of relationships between the concepts, help to write definitions, andfacilitate comparative analysis. Subject to bilingual conceptual and terminological analysis is also the decimalpositional numeral system, the decimal referring to the use of 10 symbols 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 to construct allnumbers. The comparative analysis contrasts conceptual systems of ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands,hundred thousands, and millions in the English and Slovak language. The bilingual conceptual system can berepresented by symbols, as well as by the terms in both languages. The conceptual system represents the hierarchybetween the concepts and superordinate and subordinate relationships. Such hierarchical attitude is described interminology as a generic and partitive relationship. In terminology research, the following methods have been used:observation, excerption, conceptual analysis, term analysis, comparative analysis of bilingual conceptual systems,classification of ordinal numbers, and synthesis of data. As a result of contrastive terminology work, (excerption,harmonisation, and terminography), English and Slovak bilingual conceptual systems of ordinal numbers have beenmodelled and displayed in the model of formal and graphical representation of bilingual conceptual systems ofordinal numbers. Systems have shown similarities and differences between the mathematical concepts of bothlanguages. In the case of terminography, the bilingual conceptual systems and terminology records have been readyfor multiple uses, for example, glossary, dictionary, and database …). The English language belongs to analyticallanguages, the Slovak language to synthetical languages. Due to different language types, differences in the conceptsare present. In the conclusion of contrastive terminological research in the conceptual systems, there are somefindings and recommendations for practice. Findings help to model concept structures based on specialisedknowledge of the field and clarify the relations between concepts. The conceptual system facilitates the comparativeanalysis of concepts and designations across languages and helps specialists in writing the definitions.