On the special meaning and usage of Japanese verb “oku” in mathematics

――towards the study of “unnoticeable” special vocabulary(2)

SATO Hirotaka HANAZONO Satoru

In textbooks or papers of mathematics in Japanese, there are “unnoticeable” special vocabulary, which are very ordinary Japanese words but have meanings quite different from those in daily uses. Because they look ordinary at first glance, students who study Japanese feel difficulty in understanding these terms.

Among them, we picked up mathematical use of Japanese verb “oku”, which is used as follow .

Ordinary use: Taroo ga hon wo teeburu ni oku

“Taroo” SUB “book” OBJ “table” Dative

(Taro puts a book on the table)

Mathematical use: γ=R2 to oku, suruto …

REPORT “and then”

(Put γ=R2 , and then …)

We collected ordinary-use-examples of “OKU” from modern Japanese novels, compared them with examples cited from mathematics, and pointed out their special meaning come from their special syntactic structure.