I'm kind of glad you brought this up because I was actually just writing about this both in the megathread and on my blog, so it's on the brain!Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Dec 27, 2022 12:58 amVery interesting etymological development, but I'm not entirely sure I'm following how they got from "mother of" to "a brother" in the case of helium. And while the "mother of" system is very good for elements that were isolated at some point during the development of modern chemistry, I'm less sure about those that were already known in their elemental form in times before the development of modern chemistry, like various metals. Wouldn't these already have have long-established traditional names by the time it became known that they're "elements" in the modern sense?
In the case of helium, there's a couple factors at play here. First, the idea of a second or secondary thing being associated with or outright being the "brother" of that thing is a deep-rooted one in the PTO cultural complex (like, even the word höhsë 'four' was originally a compound of hö 'brother' + isë 'three'). Second, it's shorter than saying eámr 'father', which further would obscure the "brotherly" symbolism. Third, it was kind of a kludgy workaround for using móm in this specific application. Normally the ikłe X construction is used to specify atomic weights, full stop—for instance, móm ĝ kr ikłe 14 'carbon-14'—but because of cultural stubbornness they wanted to still use móm for a three-nucleon nucleus, even though this would be ambiguous between tritium and tralphium (helium-3's older, snobby name that I like to use). Hö was kind of agreed upon as the least-worst option, though it's essentially a -2 on the weight implied by the ikłe X. (I totally did not just pull this out of my ass because you saw an inconsistency I missed.)
(Incidentally, electrons are egáma (sg. keáma) 'grandmothers'.)
Anyway, there are nonetheless other strategies for naming elements (and some noteworthy substances or materials).
- Elements from antiquity have their own names: ûn 'gold', gákłi 'silver', ürḫar 'bismuth', ëtsín 'tin'.
- Iron is a special case of the above, as it has two words. Raw, unworked, or elemental iron is ĝaĝ. Worked iron is tiên, a loan from Mute Caber (the old saw goes that the Caber gave the Tim Ar the secret of writing in exchange for metallurgy, but the historicity of that is questionable). Steel is kahál 'strong', used substantively as a shortening of tiên kahál 'strong (worked) iron'.
- Bronze also gets its own special name, lugna kiĝ 'red metal'.
- The móm n X formula is alive and kicking: móm ĝ kr 'mother of charcoal' > 'carbon', móm ĝ ḫuú 'mother of breath' > 'oxygen', móm n raáḫ 'mother of division' > 'U-235'.
- Some get named by just repurposing an existing word: ëslug 'hardy' > 'tungsten'.
- Descriptive phrases are also a Thing: lugna sígna 'yellow metal' > 'uranium'.
A few honorable mentions:
- The adjective hún 'dark-colored' (here, 'blue') is used to describe nuclear things: agamári hún 'nuclear weapons' (lit. 'blue weapons').
- A rocket's exhaust/thrust/thrust plume is called its saman 'voice'.
Also I just realized how I can kind of show that î is not a preposition but a derivational marker: Given some placenames Ákmrgámr and Kuasagua, you could say something like tiên î Kuasagua 'Kuasaguan iron'; tiên ĝ Kuasagua 'iron from Kuasagua' would just imply that the iron had maybe been shipped there. As well, for purposes of syntax, the î X construction is treated as an adjective and not an oblique phrase.
I also also just spent like two hours typing up mathematical conventions in CT for my blog…my brain's kind of…fried. If I can manage not to fall asleep maybe I'll post about it in the megathread.
