I just learned (or relearned — I had probably run across it before) that the Russian word for ‘fluorine’ is фтор [ftor]; as Russian Wikipedia explains:
The name phthore (from Greek φθόριος ‘destructive’), proposed by André Ampère in 1816, is used in Russian, Greek, and some other languages. Many other countries, on the other hand, use a name derived from the ancient names of the mineral fluorite CaF2, which in their turn originated from its ability to decrease the melting point of the metallurgical slag formed during the reduction of metals from ores and to increase its fluidity (Lat. fluere ‘flow’). Ampère, in his letter to Davy of August 26, 1812, proposed the word fluorine, which thanks to the addressee of the letter got a fixed place in the English language.
I was pleased to find in the OED the entry phthore, n.:
Forms: 1800s phthor, 1800s phthore, 1800s phtor.
Etymology: < French phthore (1819 or earlier as phtore) < ancient Greek ϕθορά destruction < an ablaut variant of the base of ϕθείρειν to destroy, to corrupt: see phthartic adj.), so called on account of the corrosive action of hydrofluoric acid.
French phthore is attributed to A. M. Ampère (1775–1836).Chemistry. Obsolete. rare.
Fluorine. Cf. phthorine n.
1858 R. G. Mayne Expos. Lexicon Med. Sci. (1860) 951/2 Phthore.
1890 Webster’s Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang. Phtor,..fluorine. (Written also phthor.) [Also in later dictionaries.]
Phthor would make a good name for a superhero.
Or Phthorn. His superpower is reconstructing anomalous PIE consonant clusters.
This is cool! I kind of wish it had been ффор! :^D
Are there any instances of Greek ϕθ among the earlier loanwords into Slavic, as in the religious vocabulary? The only things I could find in a quick search were things that must be modern like фтор, such as афта.
I can’t find any either, but on looking in Dahl I found:
So apparently in Dahl’s day the fluor- form was still preferred, at least by him. The brackets were added by Baudouin de Courtenay; I don’t know if they mean he doubted the words existed.
Presumably Greek ϕθ would have been rendered as фѳ, but I can’t find any examples.
Edit: I did turn up the line “Почему не сожжен Клеоним и Фѳор?” from a version of Aristophanes’ Clouds, but it’s a modern version, so I have no idea what’s going on.
FWIW, it’s “флуор” in BG. Zero Idea about etymology.
Phthor sounds like the name of a sarcastic and unhelpful superhero. “Say, could you climb up to the top of this skyscraper, fend off the flesh-eating ravens, and rescue the beautiful girl?” “Aah, phthor, that’s Superman’s kind of thing, not mine.”
@Xerib
There are less modern words in Russian, but the ones I can find are via Iranian or Turkic, not direct from Greek:
нефть
дифтери́т
дефте́р
can be found in Vasmer.
The initial and final sounds in фтор led me to believe it was some version of fluor though I was always too lazy to check just how. Glad to learn different.
Minor nit: The “Davie” you transliterated from Russian I presume is Humphrey Davy.
Flußspat was Russified (probably in the XVIII century) as плавиковый шпат so hydrofluoric acid, HF, is known as плавиковая кислота. An innocent name for a nasty substance.
Aristophanes has Theorus, Феор. The ѳ must be an OCR glitch.
Minor nit: The “Davie” you transliterated from Russian I presume is Humphrey Davy.
D’oh! Thanks, fixed.
Aristophanes has Theorus, Феор. The ѳ must be an OCR glitch.
Ah, that makes sense.
Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist who blogs for Science magazine, wrote a ‘things-I-won’t-work-with’ post about FOOF:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride
A destroyer/corruptor would be a supervillain, I should think.
“We don’t know how to contain Phthor!”
Also reminded of: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time
And also: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride
>see phthartic adj.), so called on account of the corrosive action of hydrofluoric acid.
C’mon. You just added in this bit from an episode of Captain Underpants to see whether we were reading closely, right?
Now Flussspat, and the acid is Flusssäure. Triple letters are not just for the Nine Billion Names of God anymore.
phthartic, adj. (from OED, for Captain Underpants):
That entry was updated in March 2006; if they had just waited another year they could have added an example of actual non-dictionary use, from Ken Gremillion’s The Velocity of Falling Bodies (p. 90): “The sheriff raised a regal hand to the vespillo’s phthartic claim.”
Oh, but wait, they could have gotten one already from Samuel R. Delany’s Flight from Nevèrÿon (© 1985, 1989, 1994, p. 229):
incicurable, adj., not updated since 1900, can also get a new cite:
If I could given a hug in the manner of my space, I would have given one, language hat.
Oh, but wait, they could have gotten one already from Samuel R. Delany’s Flight from Nevèrÿon (© 1985, 1989, 1994, p. 229):
And they fly at Ciron, Bellona, the mad city that is.
way from the terrifying weaponry, out of
the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the
hills, I have come t
WikiP:Naphtha says the term came to Greek originally from Persian (and before that, from Akkadian).
For English naphtha, the OED states: ” < classical Latin naphtha < Hellenistic Greek νάϕθα" (and also goes to Aramaic/Akkadian).
Hm, the OED has an entry for "nefte" as well.
Interesting. It seems a bit odd that Russian had no input from Greek, but there it is.
Why would it be odd? I would have assumed that Russian got it from Old Bulgarian, Koine Greek, or Persian. We are living in a tale of Plagues and Carnivals.
Phthor (no final e) is also the title of Piers Anthony’s sequel to his novel Chthon (1967). Charles Platt wrote two further novels in the series. Unfortunately their titles don’t include any such interesting consonant clusters: they are Plasm and Soma. (Source: Wiki)
The cluster phth is dear to us ophthalmologists, as we are the only group who can be relied upon to spell the word correctly (it’s the first thing they teach you in Ophthalmology School.)
The second one is phthisis bulbi?
Now I’m curious about whether there’s a word out there, however obscure, with a “thph” sequence. One does have compounds (thus not evidencing a single cluster) w/o that exact spelling, such as “Bathford” and “AthFest.” Maybe Bloom County’s Bill the Cat, famed for such exclamations as “ACK! THBBFT!” could help?
[Please ignore the following comment, which resulted from an absurd misreading on my part — LH.]
Now I’m curious about whether there’s a word out there, however obscure, with a “thph” sequence. One does have compounds (thus not evidencing a single cluster) w/o that exact spelling, such as “Bathford” and “AthFest.”
Ahem.
The OED has bethphany (also bethphanie, quite obsolete), “A term invented by the Schoolmen for the ‘third divine manifestation’ commemorated in the feast of Epiphany, viz. the miracle ‘in the house’ at Cana of Galilee.” That is, the water into wine one.
It seems a bit odd that Russian had no input from Greek, but there it is.
The southern Caspian region that was controlled by Iranian or Iranized Turkic empires in late medieval and early modern times (and is now divided between the modern states of Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkmenistan) was probably the source of the naphtha reaching Russia. There is discussion in the section entitled Naptha in this entry on heating and lighting fuel in the Encyclopædia Iranica. There is also interesting information in this section about earlier history in the Wikipedia article on the Azerbaijani petroleum industry.
Consulting one online lexicon of ancient Greek, I alas find zero words beginning with θφ compared to a number beginning with φθ … To hat’s “ahem,” a “thf” orthographic sequence is simply less interesting for this purpose even if the underlying phonemes are the same. Although I suppose the vaguely similar opening sequence fht-, as in “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!,” is interesting in its own way.
Good lord, I misread your “w/o” as “with” and snarked uselessly. I withdraw my “ahem” and direct a “for shame” in my own direction.
, I alas find zero words beginning with θφ compared to a number beginning with φθ
Ancient Greek doesn’t have initial clusters of dental stop plus labial stop at all, only the other way round, so that’s not surprising.
bethphanie
Love this!
Bethphania already turns up in a sermon (p. 196 here) of Alain de Lille, of the twelfth century.
Thanks, Y! Quoth the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia (1907): ‘a barbarous invention of the schoolmen, from the Hebrew bēth, “house,” and the Greek -phaneia, “manifestation.”‘
To Hans’ point, I suppose this is the same pattern whereby there are plenty of ancient Greek words beginning πτ- but none beginning τπ-. (Pt- versus Tp-, if your screen display like mine doesn’t distinguish that pair very well visually with the Greek letters …) And ditto for βδ (e.g. English “bdellium”) versus δβ.
there are plenty of ancient Greek words beginning πτ- but none beginning τπ-.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy
There’s also the Rothphone, (a sarrusophone built in the form of a saxophone).
I had never heard of the rothphone, and I’m in what is probably the small minority of the human species who have been at a musical performance where a sarrusophone was played.
There’s a lot of PhThino in Greek, meaning wine? It’s onomatopoeatic for */wino/ I think.
I like it that both ophicleides and rothphones have come up here recently. If someone is going to write and arrange for performing a symphony or something for those two instruments, I’d like to reserve a ticket.
The term Schoolmen is new to me.
Schoolmen: The teachers of philosophy and theology at the medieval European universities, then usually called ‘schools’ […]
I’ve never heard of the sonority hierarchy being invoked with sounds of the same class (e.g. voiceless stops); [t] doesn’t seem more sonorous than [p] or [k] in any obvious sense.
The constraint in Greek is that in all monomorphemic stop+stop clusters (not just initial ones) the second stop must be a dental. I’m not sure precisely what the articulatory or acoustic grounds for this are, but there does intuitively seem to be something more “pronounced” about a dental release than a labial or velar one.
There are a whole slew of alternative wind instruments that are rarely used. Some of them seem to be just as serviceable as the ones that see regular use, and it’s just random which ones became the standards.
Many of them are also not very distinctive in appearance. One time, we were eating out at one of those restaurants with lots of random objects bolted to the walls (not TGI Fridays, but the same idea) with my wife’s aunt, who is, in most areas, not very knowledgeable. However, she was a high school band teacher, and she pointed out that two of the instruments up on the walls were actually lesser-known variants of more common winds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethphage
https://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/
The Unicode character U+1D0C5 bears the official name “BYZANTINE MUSICAL SYMBOL FHTORA SKLIRON CHROMA VASIS” and looks like 𝃅 if you have a proper font for it. This is supposedly a now-sanctified typo, but WE know better.
In any case there is an official alias with FTHORA.
Presumably Greek ϕθ would have been rendered as фѳ, but I can’t find any examples.
Trying to look up the pre-1917 Russian spelling of Bethphage (the modern spelling is Виффагия), I found this list; it has one root with фѳ – Нефѳалимъ “Naphthali”, and two roots with ѳф – Виѳфагія “Bethphage” and Іеѳфай “Jephthah” [sic, in that order].
Google does find a few instances of the (slightly more) expected Іефѳай. It doesn’t appear that there are any non-proper-noun examples of either sequence; if there are they can’t be on that list.
EDIT: in fact out of the four (4) Google results for (the unexpected form) Іеѳфай, one is the aforementioned list, one is a scanno for Ἰεσσαί, one is a probable typo (the exact same sentence occurs elsewhere in the other spelling), and one might be real but only because I couldn’t find the alternate version.
Interesting; thanks for checking!
I almost assumed most people participating in this conversation knew that φθυνο is a brand of cheap wine.
I can’t find anything by googling “φθυνο”; is that the way it’s spelled? (It would, of course, be a homonym of φθηνό/φτηνό ‘cheap.’)
φθυνδερβιρδ
on the island where i live, the θϕ consonant cluster has been eliminated:
per wikipedia:
Powell called the land he purchased [sic] “Bethphage”, because it was situated between two other places on Long Island, Jericho and Jerusalem, just as the biblical town of Bethphage (meaning “house of figs”) was situated between Jericho and Jerusalem in Israel. Today, the Long Island place formerly called “Jerusalem” is known as Wantagh and Island Trees, while the placename Jericho, also a Quaker settlement at that time, still has that name. Over time, the second “H” was dropped from the name, to spell “Bethpage”.
it’s a pity about the long island jerusalem! i can hear the conductor now: “now departing locust manor, stay on this montauk train for jerusalem, babylon, and points east…”
I had a sudden curiosity as to why Babylon in NY was called that…
https://www.townofbabylon.com/286/A-New-Babylon
So… Basically, Conklin was trolling his mom?
Tch.
I note that around that time, the original Babylon, as a real place, was in the news:
WikiP:Babylon:
So… Basically, Conklin was trolling his mom?
Apparently so! Great story.
Фтор (or something similar) is used across Russian Europe and Central Asia, mostly under Russian influence: Belorussian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, and Mongolian. Eastern European Slavic languages use “fluor” or something similar.
In Inner Mongolia they use флор, possibly also from Russian (флуор).
If anyone is interested in reading more about Dioxygen Diphthoride (ΦOOΦ), I note that a scan of the original paper is available.
It is helpfully annotated in red with a conversion of Kelvin to degrees F, and with all of the instances of phrases such as “reacted violently” and “exploded” carefully underlined.
The author wrote his paper based on: Addition and Substitution Products of Oxygen Fluorides (for the Office of Naval Research), which goes into more detail for those who are morbidly curious about that sort of thing.
Huh, turns out I already have a file named O2F2.pdf. I don’t seem to have ever read it.
Didn’t have the other one…
Owlmirror: what do you mean by “If anyone is interested in reading more about Dioxygen Diphthoride”? It’s a staple of idiotic chemistry superweapons in SF.
@V: Clearly, our SF reading does not overlap. The only text I have read about FOOF was Erik Lowe’s writing (and the sources for Lowe’s post which I was just recently inspired to search for), and this, the only SF I know of that references FOOF:
https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/
Where it is described by the narrator to be an idiotic thing to try to use for anything.
Thanks, I had forgotten half of this story and needed to read it again!
The latest comment is from this July, BTW. And an earlier comment has me imagining the Nazis burning down the Maginot line with chlorine trifluoride like Conan the Barbarian burning the styrofoam temple at the end of the movie…
@David Marjanović: For me, the canonical example of burning down the styrofoam city as the denouement is not Conan the Styrian, but “Death to the Daleks” (my all-time favorite Doctor Who story).
That city doesn’t burn. It melts!
Styria is unrelated to styrene, just saying.
Day saved, I can finally go to bed.
Owlmirror: I’ve not read (or heard of) Erik Lowe before, but I know of FOOF by memetic mutation, I guess. Charlie Stross’ books, I think, and James Nicoll. I think it was used as a plot device in one of Ken McLeod’s books, also, but I’m not sure about that.
I’ve not read (or heard of) Erik Lowe before, but I know of FOOF by memetic mutation, I guess.
“Erik Lowe” in turn must be memetic mutation of Derek Lowe, the author of the “things I won’t work with” series. I’m familiar with the series but I’d have needed to check to have any idea who the author was.
Lately I’m much more commonly (than a few years ago) seeing references to FOOF in science-fiction-y discussions on forums and/or Discord, often with a link to Lowe’s post(s) if people start asking what the abbreviation means.
Yikes! Yes, “Derek Lowe”, not “Erik Lowe”. I apologize for the error.
MattF posted the comment with the first link to the post on FOOF above on Dec 15 @ 6:15pm, with the author’s name correctly spelled. My following comment didn’t have his name with the links.
I am fixing some confusion Wikipedia has between Derek Lowe the chemist and the more famous Derek Lowe the pitcher.
(This was held up for moderation, probably because the repeated name made it look like procedurally generated spam.)
I read the Streng paper yesterday. There’s an appendix that casually tells you how to make FOOF and FOOOF. It doesn’t tell you how to make FOOOOF, but does tell you the stuff has been made.
It also assumes you’ve seen liquid ozone and can recognize that shade of blue.
“It also assumes you’ve seen liquid ozone and can recognize that shade of blue.”
I love that casual anthropophobia that seems to be universal among chemistry teachers.
I’m not sure what you mean. Where’s the fear of people in this?
phthartic … actual non-dictionary use … already from Samuel R. Delany’s Flight from Nevèrÿon
Since the OED has no examples of phthartic outside of dictionaries, it should have been labeled as “Apparently only attested in dictionaries or glossaries.” (This label recently replaced the old cryptic notation “rare-0”.)
But if phthartic never appeared outside dictionaries before 1985 — and as far as Hathi, Google, EEBO, and ECCO can tell me, it didn’t — then where did Delany get it? Did he read old medical dictionaries just to savor the vocabulary? Wouldn’t put it past him. Delany clearly doesn’t expect the reader to recognize it, it’s just something parallel to “monstrous”, intimidatingly and unpronouncably Greek, that leaps from the loom of language.
Habromanic is the third one in that quote that’s all but nonexistent outside old dictionaries, though it may be recognizable in modern times from “Habromania Haven,” the San Francisco home of pioneer lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. They defined habromania, in Lesbian/Woman, as “a type of insanity characterized by delusions of a pleasing nature,” but there are old dictionaries — including the OED — which say “the delusions are of a cheerful or gay character,” all the more fitting!
Delany is currently cited 25 times in the OED, for both fiction and nonfiction, including the first two cites for subjunctivity in the literary criticism sense: “The relationship between something proposed or portrayed (esp. in science fiction) and reality; degree of realism or probability.”
OK, you piqued my curiosity, so I asked the question on the first FB post of his I ran into:
https://www.facebook.com/samuel.delany/posts/10229335325235434
Who knows, maybe he’ll answer?
It seems I didn’t notice at the time that the AAASholes didn’t carry the comments with them when they imported the blog posts.
foof to me signifies the nym of a well-known participant in the Scheme community (thus capitalized because it is an IRC nick). I have never asked him why he adopted it. It is also used in foof-loop, the name of an extensible iteration library. However, foof-loop was not written by foof, but by another participant whose nick is Riastradh ‘contortion’, specifically ‘Cuchulainn’s warp-spasm from the Red Branch cycle’. Foof himself did write an earlier loop library, originally named loopy-loop but now generally known as chibi-loop because it is part of his small but powerful Scheme implementation Chibi ‘child’. Fortunately, foof-loop is broadly compatible with foof’s loop.
Another looping package, unfortunately unavailable but described in a well-known article, is shivers-loop, after the surname of its creator Olin Shivers, author of another Scheme library named scsh < Scheme shell and the most, ahem, curious of all acknowledgements in the Scheme world.
Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.
1994 hmm echoing “I did it all on my own” at about 5:30 — though well worth listening on for another minute for the sickest burn.