![]() ![]() They just don't stand out the way, say, "chlorine" and "hydrogen" do. Listening to a lecture or holding discussions that mention chemical elements and hearing the elements referred to by these monosyllabic names is challenging, to say the least. This actually causes great problems for Chinese chemists and other scientists, as well as the lay public, since there are so many homophones and near-homophones among them and with other monosyllabic words not on the list. The first thing we may say about the names of the chemical elements in Chinese is that every single one of them is monosyllabic. and I wonder what the Chinese equivalent of those elements is. Newly discovered elements these days are named (in English) after people: Bohrium, Rutherfordium, Fermium, Einstenium, etc. It makes me wonder what the protocol is for naming new elements in Chinese, since they seem to be focused on the properties of the element itself, and that would take more investigating than might be possible for new elements, which usually only exist for fractions of fractions of seconds. The character for water is a large part of the character for mercury, and a few others, and all of the gas elements have the same character in them. Specifically the character for gold, which is also the character for metal in general, and is a prefix for a large portion of the periodic table. This may or may not be the "official" periodic table, but I thought it was interesting to see the similarities in the characters. I was wondering what the periodic table of elements looked like in China, and found this image. Mike Pope relayed to me the following from his son Zack, a high school physics teacher: ![]()
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