![]() ![]() ![]() xī)Ĥ3 Tc Technetium 鍀:锝 dé (PRC) 鎝:钅+荅 tǎ (Tw)ħ1 Lu Lutetium 鑥:镥 lǔ (PRC) 鎦:镏 liú (Tw)ĩ4 Pu Plutonium 鈈:钚 bù (PRC) 鈽:钸 bù (Tw)ĩ7 Bk Berkelium 錇:锫 péi (PRC) 鉳 běi (Tw)ĩ8 Cf Californium 鐦:锎 kāi (PRC) 鉲:钅+卡 kǎ (Tw)ĩ9 Es Einsteinium 鎄:锿 āi (PRC) 鑀 ài (Tw)ġ07 Bh Bohrium U+28A0F:钅+波 bō (PRC) pō (Tw)ġ18 Uuo Ununoctium Eka氡:Eka氡 or 118號元素:118号元素Īddendum: This, from Ariel Herman, has been in my drafts folder since 10/27/10:Īnd here's the elements song in Japanese. So far as I can tell, it is more comprehensive and up-to-date than any list of Chinese names for the chemical elements that is available anywhere.ġ4 Si Silicon 硅:硅 guī (PRC) 矽:矽 xì (Tw) (PRC pron. ![]() In the end, several colleagues helped me devise our own list, which, for now, can only be found here on Language Log. Various Chinese versions of the periodic chart of elements were not hard to locate, but they were all unsatisfying in one way or another (not well organized, not very legible, incomplete, etc.). I was both surprised and disappointed by how hard it was to find a simple numerical list giving the following information for each element: number, symbol, English name, Chinese character (traditional and simplified), Pinyin. And that brings up the matter of multiple characters for the same elements and multiple readings for the same characters in Taiwan and China (see the list below).Īfter receiving Mike's message, I set about doing the necessary research to answer Zack's questions. In addition, as more and more new elements are being discovered, chemists in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere have not yet devised any character for several of them. Unicode strives to add these newly created characters to the higher levels of its latest versions, but there is always naturally going to be a time lag between the creation of new characters and the time they are actually implemented in Unicode. These characters serve no other purpose than to designate the elements in question, and a number of them do not exist in electronic fonts. Most of the characters for elements that were isolated during the Industrial Age or discovered more recently have had to be invented from scratch to transcribe the sound of the initial part of the name of the element in Western languages. Only a few of the characters for the elements existed in premodern times (e.g., those for "silver", "copper", "iron", "tin", "gold", "lead", "mercury", "carbon", "boron", and "sulfur"). In terms of the classification of the elements by state (solid, liquid, gas, unknown) and type (metals, nonmetals ), and metalloids, the division (according to character radicals) into metal, gas, stone, and water is not accurate. Last, there are two characters that contain the water radical 氵/ 水: xiù 溴 ("bromine") and gǒng 汞 ("mercury"). After that comes a smaller group of characters containing the "stone / rock" radical 石. Next in number are characters that contain the "gas / vapor" radical 气. ![]() The vast majority of the Chinese characters for the elements contain the "gold / metal" radical 金. 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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