Herewith another Languagehat Poll combined with a Languagehat Gripe. I was reading the latest article about ibogaine, which may or may not be a wonder drug, when it occurred to me to wonder about the etymology and pronunciation. I had always mentally said /ˈaɪboˌgeɪn/ (EYE-bo-gain; I use /o/ because I don’t reduce it as far as /ə/), but I didn’t remember if I’d heard that somewhere or just invented it. So I looked around and discovered that the etymology was (per AHD):
[French ibogaïne, from New Latin (Tabernanthē) iboga, species name of shrub in whose root it is found, probably ultimately from Ghetsogho (Bantu language of Gabon) ibogha; akin to boghaga, to cure.]
So far so good, and it even had a derivation within Tsogo. But I was appalled to see that the pronunciation given was (ĭ-bō′gə-ēn′, -ĭn). Had I been flagrantly mispronouncing it for years? I checked OED: “/ɪˈbəʊɡəiːn/ ib-OH-guh-een.” And M-W? “i-ˈbō-gə-ˌēn.” It wasn’t looking good — I was going to have to retrain my brain. But then I thought “let me check video clips and make sure,” and lo and behold, every one of them, even those with experts speaking, used my untutored version, EYE-bogain. So now I was pissed: the dictionaries were conspiring to hoodwink their users and try to get them to use their fake pronunciation! I turn to the Varied Reader — if you are familiar with the word, how do you say it? And have you heard anyone say it the dictionary-approved (and very unnatural) way (ih-BOH-guh-een)?
Rhymes with cocaine, rogaine, and champagne. (Quite a party!)
What if you pronounce cocaine etymologically, as CO-cuh-een?
for comparison, wikip allows either /ˈaɪbjuːproʊfɛn/ or /aɪbjuːˈproʊfən/, eye-bew-PROH-fən
I’m not familiar with Ibogaine, but seeing the lurking ‘g’ and darkest Africa, I might be led into an echo of ‘Igbo’.
for comparison, wikip allows either /ˈaɪbjuːproʊfɛn/ or /aɪbjuːˈproʊfən/, eye-bew-PROH-fən
Yeah, but those are both reasonable pronunciations, differing only in stress. If you were looking at “ibuprofen” that’s how you’d be likely to say it. I refuse to believe that an average English-speaker, looking at “ibogaine,” would say /ɪˈbəʊɡəiːn/ ib-OH-guh-een.
In French it’s apparently l’ibogaïne. Beware the diaresis! (But don’t let it affect pronunciation in English, I should think.)
Ukraine: spelled the same in English, French and German; syllable boundary usually respected in German, never in French, AFAIK never in English either.
-oid(e): syllable boundary respected in French (spelled with ï) and German, not in English.
Two clicks away from Tsogo is:
“Rimba (Irimba) is the speech variety of the Babongo-Rimba pygmies of Gabon. Generally considered a dialect of Punu, it may preserve a core of non-Bantu vocabulary, and so to be conservative should be considered unclassified.[1]”
I am rusty on Bantu pronunciations, but the ibogha plant name would be approximately ih-BOH-gha if memory serves.
Without knowing the etymology, I would also go for EYE-bogain though..
vaguely related digression – in re the amapiano post of some time back, it reminded me of how the S. African sports teams that were known as the Springboks or Bokke in apartheid, became the amaBokke once the teams were integrated.. see link from my name here.
Ukraine: spelled the same in English, French and German; syllable boundary usually respected in German,
I have frequently heard it pronounced with the ai as a diphthong by German speakers.
-oid(e): syllable boundary respected in French (spelled with ï) and German
Except in Polaroid, where in my experience it’s pronounced as a diphthong.
I don’t know anything about Tsogo*, but ibogha and boghaga look like they come from proto-Bantu *bʊ́k- “divine, cure”, cognate with Kusaal bʋk “divine”, bʋgʋr “abode of a spirit” and bʋgʋd “person who consults a diviner.”
The Kusaal root is easily reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta, with cognates farther afield in “Gur”, like Kassem vʋ̀ “divine” (perfective vʋga), Chakali vʊ́g “shrine.”
* Per WALS, the only source seems to be Raponda-Walker, André. 1950. Essai de grammaire tsogo. Suppl. Bull. Institut d’Etudes Centrafricaines. Brazzaville: Institut d’Etudes Centrafricaines.
Not much out there on its closer relatives, either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsogo_languages
I’ve never heard it spoken, I think, but would pronounce it EYE-bo-gain if left to my own devices (rhymes with cocaine). But I bring no linguistic expertise to this table.
Glottolog, which has more detailed bibliographies, lists as the only dictionary of the language an unpublished one by the same Raponda-Walker. His published book, Les Plantes utiles du Gabon, is where I would look.
All those cocaïne–caffeïne–proteïn words naturally merge the final two syllables in English, but that should give /ɪˈboʊɡeɪn/. I guess the analogy of ibuprofen is too strong to resist.
I’ve never heard it spoken, I think, but would pronounce it EYE-bo-gain if left to my own devices (rhymes with cocaine). But I bring no linguistic expertise to this table.
See, that’s what I mean. People with linguistic expertise are irrelevant, being a tiny fraction of the population (and often confused about their own usage).
What I want to know is, where did all those dictionaries get their (CLEARLY INCORRECT) pronunciations? Did they ask a passing Frenchman?
I can imagine that the first few anglophones who borrowed the French word kept close to the French pronunciation. Maybe they were L1 fr L2 en chemists. This pronunciation stuck for a while but was gradually superseded as more people learned the word through writing rather than word of mouth. It could be that the word entered dictionaries when this process was incomplete, and the lexicographers consulted one of the pioneers.
But
(a) coincidence that multiple dictionaries should ask early adopters. Straight from the same horse’s mouth?
(b) I would expect that by the time the word was well enough known to merit inclusion in a general dictionary the old pronunciation would be obsolete
Cocaine isn’t a French loanword, so rhyming with cocaine rather than with caffeine would presumably be a spelling pronunciation or a calque.[1] A loanword is normally borrowed pronunciation and all.
[1] Though what’s it called when the spelling pronunciation takes over?
Ah. Nurse and Philippson’s The Bantu Languages has a chapter on Guthrie’s B30 grouping, which they reckon is an actual genetic group (not always so with the Guthrie labelling.)
Apparently (p372) “being the privileged means of communication of the local Bwiti cult which has initiates all over the country, Tsogo has considerable social and cultural prestige.”
The languages are, I see, notable for double, or sometimes even triple, (apparently) non-conditioned reflexes of proto-Bantu *p *c *k *d *g. This is something of a cause célèbre in Bantu studies, as, on the face of it, it makes it look like the weirdo top-left Bantu languages are not actually derived from yer classical proto-Bantu at all.
John Stewart was very into this, as part of his proposal that his proto-Niger-Congo had a contrast of fortis and lenis stops throughout; but I gather that even he latterly decided that the Bantu evidence didn’t fit very well, and the Bantuists seem mostly to have concluded that the multiple-reflexes problem can too be explained via conditioning factors (some of them tonal.)
The probably-fairly-closely-related Galwa
https://web.archive.org/web/20061116104706/http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/Annuaires/PDF/Philippson/Philippson_1996.pdf
actually has regular root-initial alternations β/p r/t ɣ/k w/b l/d y/ɟ in verb flexion and in some noun classes. (It’s notable that the Tsogo examples show ɣe- for proto-Bantu *kɪ- in the actual language name “Ghetsogho.”)
The correspondance between the initial /b/ of Kusaal bʋk “divine” and Kassem vʋ̀ “divine” actually is a split-reflexes problem: Oti-Volta /b/ can also correspond to Grusi /b/, e.g. Kusaal biig “child”, Kassem bǔ, Chakali bìé, and this seems to be unconditioned: one concludes that proto-Central-Gur actually had two separate consonants here. Unfortunately, not only do they fall together in Oti-Volta, but they also fall together in Bantu (as this very “divine, cure” root illustrates.)
Quite a few of Stewart’s proposed examples for a proto-Niger-Congo fortis/lenis contrast fall apart when you start looking at evidence outside the area he was personally best acquainted with (Potou-Akan and Bantu.) I suspect there are a lot of discoveries waiting to be made about potential conditioning factors.
cocaïne–caffeïne–proteïn
The OED1’s entry for cocaine (1891) gave a three-syllable pronunciation as correct, but also remarked “Vulgarly called kokēⁱ·n” (i.e. /ˌkoʊˈkeɪn/, as it is today). OED2 quietly dropped that note and gave only the two-syllable pronunciation; OED3 (revised 2025) disappointingly has no indication that the pronunciation was ever different.
Is there anything in English dictionaries earlier than than the supplement to the Century Dictionary here, from 1909 (I think)?
Short comment because I am away from home.
OED3 (revised 2025) disappointingly has no indication that the pronunciation was ever different.
That is truly shocking. The OED editors have abandoned their mission of creating and maintaining a historical dictionary of English.
At least they did a find-and-replace on some guy who got a knighthood or whatever, and added Lord to Tennyson, as was mentioned in some thread recently.
Thanks for that note on pronunciation, ktschwartz.
being the privileged means of communication of the local Bwiti cult which has initiates all over the country, Tsogo has considerable social and cultural prestige
Very interesting! Thanks for the all the comparative discussion, DE!
This root came up in a LH discussion of the name of Boko Haram, somewhere, didn’t it?
All those cocaïne–caffeïne–proteïn words naturally merge the final two syllables in English
TIL. I wouldn’t have thought of any of these three as bisyllabic…
I checked codeine and apparently it’s in the same category.
It seems natural now, but a century ago the 2-syllable pronunciation of the -aine/-eine ending was standard. Chambers’s dictionary (1901) gives “cocaine kō´kä-in” i.e. /ˈkəʊkɑ.ɪn/;
“protein prō´tē-in” i.e. /ˈprəʊti.ɪn/; “ptomaine tō´ma-in” i.e. /ˈtəʊmə.ɪn/.
Chambers (1988) gives “cocaine ko-kān´, kō´kā-in, kō´kä-in“; “protein prō´tē-in, -tēn“; “ptomaine tō´mā-īn, -ēn, -in (these now rare), tō´mān, tō-mān´ (these orig. illiterate, now established)”.
That’s telling you. Illiterates! Good to see the OED upholding the standards of 1900.
I have discovered that ibogaine has lesser-known siblings called iboganine and ibogamine. I surmise that, as long as they were spoken of together, matching pronunciations would reinforce each other; once ibogaine made the big time it dropped its quirky family pronunciation for something more mainstream.
The plant and the compounds were announced in Europe by Dybowski and Landrin in 1901, here:
Who are the “Pahouins”?
In 1905, Landrin further writes,
All kinds of sound changes here. And what is the l- about? It seems that if it were the French article, he’d know to remove it.
Since –caine is a productive suffix in naming local anesthetics, lots of new names, such as benzocaine,* are coined directly with single syllable pronunciations of the caine part. I wonder what the original intended pronunciation was of xylocaine** when it was synthesized in the 1940s (and, for that matter, why it was given that name).
Note that English still has protean (an obvious doublet of protein) with three syllables. It’s mostly an adjective. However it does see some usage to refer to things, particularly organisms, that can change their shapes.
* What I use for sensitive gums.
** Still used as a brand name for lidocaine, apparently.
I’ve never thought about it before, but it’s odd that an initial ‘i’ is so often pronounced ‘eye’, even when the following vowel isn’t a ‘magic’ e. If it started ‘abo-‘ I don’t think people would be so tempted to make it ‘AYbo’
The initial vowel of ‘ibuprofen’ seems to go back to ‘isomer’, but I don’t know where *it* got it from.
I agree with mollymooly that if the first people to work with it were thinking of it as iboga+suffix then they would probably pronounce it as the dictionaries say.
“Illiterates”!? No, just the opposite; those who learn the word orally—from their Oxbridge tutor, say—will receive the current pronunciation; it’s those who learn it via reading—benighted grammar-school autodidacts, probably—who have to guess. Chambers is really warning such people to consult its fine product whenever a new word is met, lest a phonic faux pas fall from their lips.
@Stephen Rowland
It’s curious that the word illiterate is used for what seems to be a straightforward spelling pronunciation (at least for -caine, for -ein it could also be a dropped schwa). Uneducated perhaps, but not illiterate.
@Y
> All kinds of sound changes here. And what is the l- about? It seems that if it were the French article, he’d know to remove it.
Unless you made a mistake while typing and it’s not copy-pasted, that’s an uppercase i.
Frans, I thought about that, but if so the error is not mine. The word appears in Landrin’s article with a capital L.
@Y
Perhaps I misinterpreted what you meant due to the sans-serif font and now I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to, but give or take the capitalization of i it strikes me as unremarkable? “L’iboga est une plante … [which is given different names such as aboua, obouete, liboka and above all iboga].”
This root came up in a LH discussion of the name of Boko Haram, somewhere, didn’t it?
Yes, e.g. here:
https://languagehat.com/boko/#comment-4092064
drasvi astutely spotted that Waama boko “diviner” looks awkwardly like Hausa boka (both vowels long) “diviner.” (drasvi had found something by Roger Blench which lists even more cognates from the Volta-Congo “divine” root.)
I think the *bʊk- “divine” verb root is unequivocally not borrowed in Oti-Volta: as seen in my previous comments, it has a clear pedigree not only in “Central Gur” but even proto-Volta-Congo.
Having said that, Waama boko is problematic within Oti-Volta in that the word for the noun “diviner” in Oti-Volta reconstructs not to *bʊk-wa but *bǎg-wá, from a root which also turns up in Kusaal ba’ar “idol”, Farefare bàgrɛ̀ “fetish”, Buli bàgì “charm, amulet”, Gulmancema bāāgū “divination”, Moba bāād̀ “divination.” How these two roots are related to one another (if, indeed, they are) is very unclear; there seems to be no mechanism to connect them within Oti-Volta, at any rate.
Waama boko might be from an otherwise unattested *bʊk-wa after all, but it seems more likely that it just has an irregular vowel reflex instead of the expected *bako (the devoicing of *g would be regular in Waama anyway.) It might very well have been remodelled by analogy with the Waama verb bokiri “divine”, which shows the regular reflex of the POV *bʊk- root.
I don’t think a loan from Hausa is likely. The vowel length is wrong, and Hausa loans don’t otherwise seem to be at all common in Waama. Moreover, the word is connected with “pagan” practices frowned on by pious Muslim traders; it’s difficult to imagine them transmitting such a naughty Maguzawa Hausa word to their pagan Oti-Volta customers.
All this, of course, leaves unsolved the question of why Hausa has a word for “diviner” which looks so like the Volta-Congo “divine” root. But then, Hausa has even borrowed “two” from Volta-Congo …
I’m not old enough to have relevant experience; evidently people took the word as English instead of directly Greekoid and pronounced it accordingly, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me that anyone did that.
Speaking of “directly Greekoid”… given the former importance of German in chemistry, maybe German is to blame – Kokain, Kodein, Koffein, Protein etc. etc. all end in /ˈiːn/, like Aspirin and all the rest.
(The Roger Blench link mysteriously tells me that I am blocked, no doubt for my notorious splitter tendencies. But the bit that drasvi cites has RB rightly laying into Skinner’s embarrassingly bad etymological dictionary of Hausa.)
Frans: I meant that the form “Liboka” in the final list is spelled that way, with a capital L and without an apostrophe, and all in italics, unlike “L’Iboga” at the beginning.
Liboka could easily be the cognate of ibogha in a different Bantu language.
The class prefix of the Tsogo word would be Bleek-Meinhof Class 5 *lɪ-, and the Tsogo gh /ɣ/ must in any case derive from proto-Bantu *k here.
Liboka actually looks rather like a Lingala form, though I’m sorry to say my very limited lexical sources for that language don’t cite any such word.
(If it wasn’t a Lingala word before, it probably is by now. Lingala, like English, is a magpie language. Ooh, a cool word! Shiny! Mine!)
désignée dans le bas Ogoué et le Fernand Naz sous le nom d’Iboga et que les Pahouins appellent Aboua.
The language of the lower Ogoué and Fernand Vaz (not Naz) is Myene (specifically Myènè-Nkomi). Pahouin is Fang.
(Jinx.)
On the topic of Bantu cognates of Tsogo ibogha, I see that Wiktionary actually traces “ibogaine” etc to the Myene word iboga:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iboga#Myene
I can’t actually find any support for this in following the links, but it seems quite likely to me that the etymon is pretty widespread in the local Bantu languages. There are quite a lot of references to Congo, too, which would go with a Lingala source for liboka.
Eton (of which there is a nice grammar by Mark van de Velde) is part of the Fang dialect continuum. Sadly, no likely cognates of ibogha figure in the vocabulary at the back, but I suppose the word is not exactly Swadesh 100 material …
My experience or intuition with these types of words is that the more familiar they become, the more likely you are to compress the consecutive vowels into diphthongs.
I myself pronounce ‘protein’ and ‘Saudi’ as two syllables for example, but probably would use three for ‘coitus’ if I had occasion to say it aloud. To be fair though, I think I’ve only ever heard ‘coitus’ as disyllabic in the wild, like ‘Saudi’ of course (I’m not sure about ‘protein’).
That said, I would definitely use a diphthong for ibogaine.
The word is completely new to me (we need no such artificial expedients here in Wales, the land of sheep and laverbread), but, assuming that I was (somehow) aware that the name came from a plant called iboga, I’m pretty sure that I would in fact have pronounced it something like [ɪ’bogəʔin].
I checked a few 1950s educational nutrition movies, US and British. In all, the the narrators pronounce protein more or less like a disyllabic “protean”, with a [iə] diphthong, than a disyllabic “proteen”. The latter is somewhat more common these days, in which the word is used much too much.
(Shakes cane at menus which offer a “choice of protein”. Yuck. Also, protein shakes. Yuck II.)
I’m not old enough to have relevant experience;
Actually, there was a resurgence of interest in Polaroid cameras and pictures a decade ago. I know because my daughter was into that back then, and you had people taking Polaroid pictures all over Tumblr and Instagram. But that seems to have passed.
Back in the times you are probably thinking of, the term Polaroid wasn’t actually that much in use in German; the pictures would usually be referred to as Sofortbild and the instrument as Sofortbildkamera.
evidently people took the word as English instead of directly Greekoid and pronounced it accordingly
Most likely.
Most likely
I just remembered to add that the stress also supports that theory; the word is usually stressed on the initial syllable, while the “scientific” words are usually stressed -o’ï:d in German.
Another with the same synaeresis is ptomaine, whose NED entry is even more judgemental: “blunderingly formed by Professor Selmi of Bologna… As the Gr. combining stem is πτώμᾰτ-, the correct form of the word is ptomatine.”
Pahouin is Fang.
Strange statement in the linked Wikipedia article: “Despite Fang’s lack of any well-defined literary corpus, it is of note that linguists have, in the past, made attempts to compile dictionaries and lexicons for the Fang language.”
blunderingly formed by Professor Selmi of Bologna
Gotta love those judgmental old lexicographers!
I don’t think I’d pronounce it in three syllables even knowing the etymology. Cf. “cocaine”. Schwa before a vowel is very rare in English words. I’m not coming up with any examples.
Now working on a song about a woman who refuses to try this possible wonder drug:
She don’t i-, she don’t i-, she don’t i-
bogaine.
Professor Selmi of Bologna
Dr. Strabismus of Utrecht (whom God preserve.)
Despite Fang’s lack of any well-defined literary corpus, it is of note that linguists have, in the past, made attempts to compile dictionaries and lexicons for the Fang language
Yes, one might have hoped that a Wikipedian who felt capable of writing a page about an African language would have been rather more clued up about the issues.
Tony Naden’s Agolle Kusaal dictionary really is based exclusively on the extant written sources, especially the Bible translation. It’s a remarkable achievement in its way, but this is actually a severe limitation on its usefulness.
The second-and-final syllable of “codeine” (mentioned upthread) has the FLEECE vowel, rhyming with e.g. “caffeine” and “protein.” But for reasons unknown to me it instead has or at least once had the PRICE vowel in Buffy Sainte-Marie’s idiolect, back when she wrote her somewhat famous song about it. In order to account for this, the record company listed the song on the label with the eye-dialect variant spelling “Cod’ine.” (At least for the original 1964 release – I don’t know if all reissues have followed that orthography.)
Lots of other performers have done that song, and most/all of them (I don’t know of a counterexample but my inquiries have not been exhaustive) stick with her pronunciation even if they know it to be “wrong,” presumably because using the “right” pronunciation would mess up some of the rhymes. Orthographically, however, there are a lot of competing flowers blooming, with the song title variously spelled (at least per a handy internet reference source I just consulted) as “Cod’ine,” “Co’dine,” “Codine,” “Codyne,” and even “Codeine.” It looks like “Codine” is probably the mode, though. I guess it cues you to rhyme it with “iodine” and you’re somehow supposed to know not to try to rhyme it with “nicotine.”
Though the correct pronunciation of “iodine”, as used by chemists, rhymes with “nicotine”, analogously to “fluorine”, “chlorine”, “bromine”, and “astatine”.
On “somehow supposed to know”, I doubt many people sing that song without having heard a previous version, probably Buffy St. Marie’s.
Maybe Professor Selmi wanted to avert an association between ptomaine and tomatoes.
My first thought on seeing the title of this post was that it was probably about one of the lesser-known female characters in le Morte d’Arthur. Probably a younger sister of Sir Gawain.
I don’t know why a decision by some American chemists to use a British pronunciation for “iodine” would make it “correct.”* British pronunciations are no more correct than American pronunciations although of course many pretentious status-climbers have affected to think so. One should not be surprised to find a generic member of the Harvard faculty afflicted with pretension and status anxiety, of course, but I must say I am disappointed upon going back and checking that, although I had never noticed it before, Tom Lehrer uses the pretentious foreign pronunciation of “iodine” in his periodic-table song.
*The traditional international language of chemistry is, of course, German. Germans have apparently disputed whether “Iod” or “Yod” is the right spelling for the element in question, but they’re pronounced the same and there’s no extra syllable to figure out the vowel for.
My first thought on reading the title of this post was that it was a Princess Bride reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_eZmEiyTo0
“What you do not smell is called iocane powder.”
Sounds like EYE-o-kain to me.
(I thought there was an ‘i’ after the ‘a’ of ‘iocane’, but quote sites seem to mostly have it as above. I could be wrong.)
@Owlmirror: The peer-reviewed scientific literature on “iocane” uses that spelling although there admittedly seems to be some variation out there. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4057547/
@J.W.B. I think the reason many (most?) American chemists prefer to pronounce “iodine” rhyming with “marine” is the halogen analogy. By the way, Davy said that’s why he added the -ine to the name in the first place.
(I haven’t figured out who called it ione. By this paper at least Gay-Lussac was calling it iode. The modern French and German names of the halogens don’t end in -ine,)
Whatever one might think of Davy’s rationale, “violaceous” is a quite bodacious word that is perhaps not used enough in our times. The google ngram viewer has one peak for it around 1831 and another around 1904.
This reminds me of one of my favorite trivia questions, of a particular type I like. I am proud of the handful I have collected, because they share a couple of key features. There are obvious guesses one might make about the answers, but those guesses are wrong. However, it is still possible to figure out the correct answers with just a reasonable degree of general knowledge.
In this case, the question is: In expectation of the upcoming discoveries of elements numbers 117 and 118, the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry changed the rules governing how new element names were established. Why?
Iod and Yod, it’s the same . Tom Lehrer used the English pronunciation in the song. https://tomlehrersongs.com/we-will-all-go-together-when-we-go/
The google ngram viewer confirms that Profesor Selmi’s coinage “ptomaine” has seen declining levels of usage over the last century or more. Wikipedia suggests that this is probably because the whole concept of “ptomaine poisoning” was “scientifically disproven in the 1910s,” although it lingered in the popular mind for a considerable time thereafter. I think the contexts I encountered it in as a kid in the Seventies already made it seem vaguely dated, but in a Fifties kind of way rather than Edwardian kind of way. Wiktionary has an example sentence from Roth’s _Portnoy’s Complaint_: “If only a person is willing to risk polio from the pool, gangrene from the footbath, ptomaine from the hot dogs, and elephantiasis from the soap and the towels, he might possibly get laid.” (By the time PC was published in 1969, getting polio in swimming pools was fortunately no longer a thing, so the speaker is recounting an earlier time in his own life.)
Ptomaine Tommy’s of LA was quite popular in its day (1913–1958).
I will jot down “ptomato” for whenever I might have the occasion to write a devastating review of an Italian restaurant.
Re -oid, the plant genus Brodiaea has lent its name to the subfamily Brodiaeoideae, which has five vowel letters in a row. Likely there are others like it.
In Asimov’s short story I’m in Marsport without Hilda, there’s a drug called “spaceoline” (very 1950s, that.) I don’t know how the author intended it to be pronounced. One BrE recording I found online uses the PRICE vowel.
Yes, but I encountered Polaroidfoto as well.
Rather, not only is the element traditionally called Jod /joːd/, even the supposedly international symbol I used to be replaced by J. In the last 30 years, it seems to have dawned on someone that [j] is Very Much Not Classical in Greek, and so there’s been an effort to internationalize the spelling. Probably not the pronunciation, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone try to pronounce Iod specifically.
Part of the issue here is that the full separation of capital I and J took a good long while in German. In the late 19th century it was still routine to use J as the word-initial allograph of I. In the handwriting I was taught, I is actually J-shaped plus an onstroke (while J has a loop below the line, evidently copied in from j).
It was, I think, Isaac Asimov who pointed out that “periodic” is the spelling of two completely different words, pronounced very differently, both of them important in chemistry. One of them is an everyday familiar word; the other is only relevant to chemistry, and is pronounced /pə:rɑɪ̯’ɔdɪk/.
He thought of himself as a biochemist, but if you ask any modern biochemist of any significant biochemistry that he did they won’t be able to answer. To be fair, though, he wrote a very successful textbook of biochemistry, but despite strenuous efforts I’ve never managed to track down a copy.
After writing the preceding sentence I wondered if I could find the text on the web: and bingo! There it is at archive.org. I didn’t have high hopes of a book published in 1952 (before Watson and Crick), but it’s better than I expected, and although old-fashioned in some respects, it’s not hopelessly old-fashioned.
Brodiaeoideae, which has five vowel letters in a row. Likely there are others like it.
If you don’t consider Brownlowioideae to have six vowels in a row, Sequoioideae certainly has five. Relatedly, for five *different* vowel letters in a row, there are various X. sequoiae species.
Well, Danish kept the equivalence of I and J in initials until the early 20th at least. Most wellknown example: I.C.Christensen, President of the King’s Council 1905-1908 (~ Prime Minister), was a Jens Christian. Sometimes written as J.C., but spoken as I.C..
But in running text, nobody would spell Jylland as Iylland. There was some vacillation between Kjøbenhavn and Kiøbenhavn, though, where the letter denotes the palatalization of velar stops before front vowels that was a thing from like the 16th to the 18th, but was more or less gone from the standard by the time the orthography stabilized. (It’s gone beyond living memory now, and we spell København. Norway kept it, though).
Maybe what we need is a language that scorns the recent differentiation between u’s and v’s and refers to the element with 92 protons in old Roman-carving fashion as VRANIVM.
. . . somehow managed to not work in the word “inconceivable” . . .
It did site the study in Sicily.
whether “Iod” or [“Jod”] is the right spelling for the element in question
In Russian both (bisyllabic) иод and (monosyllabic) йод exist, with the latter far more common but, AFAICT, the former being considered the more standard form (and seemingly more common in spelling than in pronunciation). I’ve definitely seen J for the symbol at some point, but can’t recall where.
[At one point I’ve tried to make a table of which element symbols had already been used; it included J as well as D and T for deuterium and tritium, and also several alternates for the post-actinids that I found in old (~1990s?) periodic tables, though IIRC one of those ended up used twice for different numbers (and I consequently couldn’t fit both in). I don’t think it had stuff like Me for “metal”. Unfortunately the notebook it was in is still in Moscow.]
ETA: now that I think about it, it’s plausible that иод has stabilized as referring to the element, while йод is the usual term for medical iodine [usually as in “tincture of”]. Certainly I only rarely recall encountering the derived term “iodide” being either spelled or pronounced as anything but trisyllablc иодид.
I think about 5 of them did, and there are like 3 Seaborgiums.
As someone who likes lists, I have once or twice tried to come up with a complete list of symbols that are not available for new element names because they are used for other things. New single-letter symbols are not allowed now anyway, but there are a few, such as G or L, for which there would seem to be no problems. Here’s what I can come up with off the top of my head:
I’m not actually sure about the last one now, however. I would have thought that Ts was not allowed as an element name, on account of the tosyl group (quite similar to the triflyl group chemically) having that symbol. However, Ts was used for element 117.* I suspect that if the group that first synthesizes element 119 wants to call it “telefonium,” it would get the symbol Tf without causing much trouble. Ts is still used for tosyl groups, and Ac has meant both actonium and acetyl for the entire history of modern chemical nomenclature. Heavy radioactive elements are virtually never involved in the organic chemistry where those** functional groups are important.
*No one has tried to answer my trivia question above.
**There are probably two-letter symbols for other organic functional groups that I’m not familiar with or can’t currently remember. They all probably share similar statuses.
By coincidence, I started on the 2025 end-of-year Chemistry World jumbo cryptic crossword this afternoon. Every element symbol, including the two-letter ones, as well as D and T, appears in at least one box. Fortunately, being a British-style cryptic, it tells you how many letters each answer has, so you know how many boxes in each answer will need to contain two letters.
I figured it out, but only by using the time-honored method of cheating (that is, going to the IUPAC page on element naming, and seeing that they changed the rules for the above elements, which included the reasons).
I don’t think I could have figured it out on my own, because the question is too vague, and implies a familiarity with what the rules were before the change. Without knowing that, my vague idea was that someone wanted to use a name that was politically embarrassing or something like that (which, as you note, would have been totally wrong).
But the actual reason (using some vague wording of my own that will probably not be vague enough) is that on the one hand, they wanted to continue using established patterns of element names, but on the other hand, they had not anticipated beforehand the creation of elements of the specific classes where the appropriate established patterns would come into play. And I had no idea that both of those conditions obtained before reading that webpage. This is a case where what you think is general knowledge is actually in fact highly specific knowledge.
I soon gave up trying to find that, but seeing “an IUPAC project” on the website startled me because IUPAC itself, rather contrary to two expectations, gets pronounced /ˈjʊpak/ in German.
(At least in Vienna…)
I’ve heard both two- and three-syllable pronunciations. I use three, but I don’t know if that’s actually more common around here.
I think cancelled element names cannot be reused later for bona fide elements (so Professor Geocoronia will never be immortalised in “geocoronium”), but I don’t know if any of the cancellations had abbreviations or if those would also be skunked.
Like some others Of A Certain Age, I first encountered the word ibogaine because of Hunter S. Thompson’s story that (1972 Presidential hopeful) Ed Muskie was using it. Fwiw, Thompson appears to have pronounced it EE-bo-gin.
https://www.facebook.com/rxgonzo/videos/in-1972-hunter-s-thompson-sent-ed-muskies-presidential-campaign-into-a-tailspin-/660322798066279/
@mollymooly, does that mean that Seaborgium is somehow not bona fide? If the name was really used for other nuclei than Sg_106^263, as DM said? (WP.en doesn’t admit of any others).
I think they never became official enough to get officially canceled. They were still printed on periodic systems, though.
Kurchatovium (Ku) for 104 and Hahnium (Ha*) for 105 were on the wall in the chemistry hall in school, and that looked decades old by the late 90s…
* not the later Hn for another element
Another proposed name for element 105 that I saw on periodic tables was nielsbohrium. Bohrium (which was eventually used for element 107) was actually proposed first, but there were concerns that it sounded too similar to boron.
That’s silly. Where would Bohrium and Boron ever be confused? People can manage Radium and Radon just fine, and even Yttrium and Terbium and Erbium and Ytterbium.
Well, they did eventually decide it wasn’t something that needed to be worried about, since it is indeed hard to imagine a realistic context in which B and Bh might both be relevant.
does that mean that Seaborgium is somehow not bona fide?—even greater exceptions to my putative policy are the yellow names in this table in the Wikipedia “Transfermium Wars” article. Maybe exceptions were part of the compromise that ended the Wars, or maybe I am Just Plain Wrong.