Andy Brunning of Compound Interest (“Explorations of everyday chemical compounds”) has a great post called A Periodic Table of Rejected Element Names that gives you the background to element names that wound up falling by the wayside; the first is:
Element 4: Glucinium (Beryllium)
The French chemist, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, examined both emerald and beryl and correctly reported that they contained a new element in 1798. He named this element glucine, with the symbol Gl, but as this name was very similar to that of the amino acid glycine it was criticised. When the first samples of the element were later isolated in 1828, the acceptance of the name beryllium, suggested by another chemist, Martin Henrich Klaproth, became more widespread. However, it wasn’t until 1949 that IUPAC ruled the element should be exclusively called beryllium.
And my two favorites:
Element 94: Extremium (Plutonium)
Extremium was reportedly one of the names considered by US chemists on their discovery of element 94 in 1940. However, the eventually settled on Plutonium (with Seaborg’s little joke of its symbol being Pu instead of Pl) in order to continue the series of planet-based element names.
Element 95: Pandemonium (Americium)
The discovery of elements 95 and 96 in 1945 spurred a host of suggestions for their names. Glenn Seaborg reportedly related that his colleague, Tom Morgan, referred to elements 95 and 96 as pandemonium and delirium. Supposedly, he considered proposing these names to IUPAC’s naming committee. Though a large number of names were suggested, Seaborg eventually plumped for americium for element 95.
If you’re curious about the names actually in use, we covered that in 2004.
I’m puzzled by the story about glucine, because it didn’t seem likely to me that the amino acid glycine was known in 1798. Sure enough, the Wikipedia entry for glycine says it was discovered in 1820 and was originally named ‘sugar of gelatin.’ It wasn’t until 1848 that the name glycine was invented, by Berzelius.
It may be that glucine was originally proposed as a name for what we now call beryllium, but there must be a different story behind its rejection.
Random unrelated factoid: somewhere in my possession is a small lapel pin inscribed Sg, for seaborgium, which I think I got at an anniversary celebration of its discovery.
From wikipedia, possibly no more reliable:
In a 1798 paper read before the Institut de France, Vauquelin reported that he found a new “earth” by dissolving aluminium hydroxide from emerald and beryl in an additional alkali. The editors of the journal Annales de Chimie et de Physique named the new earth “glucine” for the sweet taste of some of its compounds. Klaproth preferred the name “beryllina” due to the fact that yttria also formed sweet salts. The name “beryllium” was first used by Wöhler in 1828.
There have also been a number of comments in the now leviathan volume of LH comments about the naming of elements in other languages. I seem to remember Korean in particular.
David L: Well spotted, the Compound Interest site gets several details wrong. The initial criticism by Klaproth was not because of the amino acid glycine, but because there were other known oxides that tasted sweet, such as yttrium oxide. Also, what Klaproth proposed was not the name of the element but the oxide, Beryllerde or Beryllina in German; the name beryllium for the element was due to Berzelius. See Dave Wilton’s new Big List entry on beryllium for primary sources.
Jen: Wikipedia is right where Compound Interest is wrong in three out of four sentences. Vauquelin’s own words refer to the oxide as terre du béril, it was the editors of the journal who suggested glucine. Again, that name refers to the oxide, not the element; the name glucinum (with less-common variant glucinium) for the element is due to Humphry Davy. Wikipedia is only wrong about the name beryllium being first used by Wöhler; in his paper on isolating it, he is clearly using it as a name already known to the audience, and earlier uses of that name (crediting Berzelius) can be found back to 1812. Primary sources at Wordorigins.
Both beryllium and glucinum remained roughly equal competitors in English into the early 20th century. (In German, it was only ever beryllium.) In fact the old OED’s entries for those words (still unrevised) treat glucinum as the primary word and beryllium as “a synonym for glucinum”. The battle wasn’t decisively won by beryllium until the 1920s, and I suspect that’s related to the commercialization of beryllium-copper alloys.
The idea of the Periodic Table of Rejected Element Names is a great one: we always need reminders of how the path of science is full of twists and turns and byways, never a straight upward march. The author just should have gotten someone to read it over and catch these little errors.
Lost Element Name Index from The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side (OUP 2014)
There have also been a number of comments in the now leviathan volume of LH comments about the naming of elements in other languages. I seem to remember Korean in particular.
You may be thinking of this 2015 post, where you posted the first comment, praising Jongseong Park’s comment at the Log about element names in Korean.
mollymooly: That’s great!
In case you’re curious, don’t try to find out if beryllium oxide really tastes sweet. Beryllium and all its compounds, emerald included, are poisonous.
I missed LH’s link to Victor Mair’s May 2022 guest post by Conal Boyce about element names in Japanese and Chinese.
Most of the commenters at the LL post are hostile to both the tenor and substance of the post.
While I disagree with the tenor of the post, I tend to agree with its conclusions. The fact is that the creation of new characters to represent newly coined Chinese element names — all monosyllabic — was a conscious decision by a relatively select group of people. There WERE other possibilities — see the late comment by Kirinputra noting that 19th century sources used expressions like 淡氣, 養氣, and 輕氣 (for nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen respectively). The aggressive regularisers/hanzi-isers changed these to 氮, 氧 and 氫. It is a great example of “nativisation” at the expense of international practice. It is also inconvenient given the relative paucity of available syllables in Chinese. The tendency in the modern language is to coin disyllabic words.
(I have found the narrowness of commenters at LL offputting at times, which is why I no longer frequent that blog.)
The alleged sweetness of various oxides is in some tension with the proper name of the ox-element, viz. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauerstoff.
@Bathrobe: Not surprisingly, the biggest narrow-minded jerkass among the commenters there is Victor Mair himself. Moreover, while I would not claim that Conal Boyce is a crackpot (he probably knows his stuff, when he’s discussion Sinitic languages), he certainly has tendencies in that direction. When he spouts off stridently about other topics (such as the history and sociology if chemistry and physics), he can be wildly, even bizarrely, wrong. See, for instance, his most recent guest post.*
* That link is dead fot me at the moment. Some Language Log posts, but not all, are not loading for me this evening.
Not surprisingly, the biggest narrow-minded jerkass among the commenters there is Victor Mair himself
Totally agree. Mair is very strange. He sounds bitter, as though he has been emotionally betrayed by China somehow.
Don’t know if Conal Boyce is a crackpot, but the tenor of his post wasn’t very…. er…. professional. It read more like a rant.
Still, I personally find the comments of people who argue against Mair and the likes of Boyce, or make anodyne comments on such posts, to be unsatisfyingly superficial. If they were commenting on a blog that criticised the US like Mair criticises China, I suspect such people would come across as shallow thinkers secure in comfortable identities. This is quite different from the commenters here, who present a spectrum of interesting views.
@Bathrobe, back during the Cold War proper we had the useful onomastic difference between “Soviet” and “Russia[n],” which made it easier to criticize the regime without necessarily criticizing the unfortunate people subject to that regime. (Calling an individual Russian a Soviet was like calling a man by the name of the disease he was suffering from, as some prominent dissident of that era put it.) We do not have the same useful lexical resources for easily distinguishing criticism of the Communist/bandit regime currently occupying mainland China by brute force from criticism of the reasonably respectable (not flawless, but who is?) civilization and society subject to that occupation.
We do not have the same useful lexical resources for easily distinguishing criticism of the Communist/bandit regime currently occupying mainland China …
We don’t? Why not ‘CCP’/’PRC’ vs ‘China’? It’s the same distinction as Churchill drew between ‘Nazis’ (or ‘Nazi State’) vs ‘Germans’ (‘Germany’). ‘Chinese Communist State’ (which used to exclude HK) vs ‘Chinese people/culture’ — which includes Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora along the S.E. Asian littoral.
Mair himself tends to use ‘Sinitic languages’ to distinguish from other languages spoken within confines of ‘PRC’ — Tibet and Xiang, Hmong, etc.
I’ve never found any difficulty with “lexical resources”.
More to fight against the myth of the single Chinese language that the PRC is most happy to sustain. Sinitic is today at least as diverse as Romance and some 500 years older (in the sense that the last common ancestor of all living Sinitic varieties was probably spoken late in the Han dynasty).
@AntC: I picked up using “P. R. C.” to refer to the odious Chinese regime. My daughter says “C. C. P.” is even better and more precise, which is undoubtedly true, but I have a hard time using it, because it’s too close to the old “C. C. C. P.”
‘Chinese Communist State’
By some people called the ‘party-state’.
Sinitic is today at least as diverse as Romance
But that is just applying European models where they don’t NECESSARILY apply.
@Brett, the difference is negligible these days. The State _is_ The Party _is_ Xi Jinping — especially after more Partyism just voted in at the 20th Congress/Xi President for life/public defenestrating of Hu Jintao/death of Jiang Zemin.
too close to the old “C. C. C. P.”
But you don’t voice that (internally) the same way(?) That’s “ess-ess-ess-arr”.
There are also Mendeleev’s “eka” elements, eg. Ekaaluminium (31) & ekamanganese (43).
Technetium (43) was variously called danubium (Da), ekamanagan or ekamanganese (Em) & masurium (Ma)….
Promethium (61) was also florentium (Fr) and illinium (Il).
Ytterbium (70) was aldebaranium (Al), spectrium (Sp) & neoytterbium (Ny)
Hafnium (72) was also celtium (Ct), jargonium (Jg), norwegium (Ng) & norium (No)
Eka, Sanskrit “one”, was used for predicted elements where the periodic table had holes. I don’t think they were intended to persist after the actual discovery of these elements.
“Azot” is still the name for nitrogen in russian. And probably it is (was?) in French or German as well, as Russian most probably borrowed it from one of these languages.
@AntC: I know that’s the correct transliteration now, but that’s not how I heard anyone pronounce “C. C. C. P.” back in my youth when the Soviet Union existed. So that’s not how I think of it.
But you don’t voice that (internally) the same way(?) That’s “ess-ess-ess-arr”.
Maybe for you, but not for the overwhelming majority of English speakers. I spend half my time on Russian, for chrissake, but when I see “CCCP” in an English context I mentally say “see-see-see-pee.”
Eka, Sanskrit “one”, was used for predicted elements where the periodic table had holes. I don’t think they were intended to persist after the actual discovery of these elements.
I actually vaguely recall hearing somewhere about a predicted element two rows below that was called dvi-something, from the Sanskrit for “two”. Unfortunately I forgot what the something was.
“Azot” is still the name for nitrogen in russian. And probably it is (was?) in French or German as well, as Russian most probably borrowed it from one of these languages.
German Stickstoff: stuff that asphyxiates, i.e. can’t sustain life. The Stick Song is mind-deadening.
French azote: part of air that cannot sustain life [Lavoisier], ἀ- (a-, “without”) + ζωή (zōḗ, “life”)
So why didn’t “glucine” still have enough currency in 1848 to block the adoption of “glycine” as a name for that rival chemical thingie?
With regard to Mair:
I once put up at my own website a Chinese and Mongolian version of the War of the Heavenly Horses from a Chinese children’s book. This episode concerned the Han-dynasty invasion of Ferghana in order to secure a supply of superior horses. It was actually presented to Mair as a veiled warning about China as an aggressive power. Mair linked to my webpage, but surprisingly he completely ignored the modern implications (China invading other countries). In his post he dwelt exclusively on the historical story. He seemed to be completely smitten by the romance of history.
I was completely taken aback. Once he got himself away from the CCP’s China and modern Chinese cultural insularity and nationalism, he seemed to emerge as a true China fan. This is why I wonder whether he feels that modern China, especially in its CCP manifestation, is a betrayal of everything he finds attractive about China. I’ve also noticed that he likes to point out modern Chinese, esp PRC, ignorance of the historical readings of Chinese characters and Xi Jinping’s cultural ignorance. Similarly, he seems to love traditional “dialect” variation and dislike the imposition of a crass modern standard (putonghua). What he hates is modern PRC China, not China itself.
Surely you’re not suggesting he should hate “China itself”?
Of course not. I’m suggesting that he is bitter about the China he sees now. It’s not how he wants China to be.
Hebrew חַנְקָן xankán, lit. ‘strangler’, is used for ‘nitrogen’, as a calque of Stickstoff, and also for ‘shrike’, as a calque of Würger.
Japanese 窒素 chisso also refers to an element that plugs up, obstructs, suffocates.
Of course not. I’m suggesting that he is bitter about the China he sees now. It’s not how he wants China to be.
Oh! Well, yeah; isn’t that true for most people outside the PRC?
I mean, I feel the same way about Russia.
Thanks to TV ads for the Shen Yun dance extravaganza I know what China before communism was like. Brightly dressed young men and women prancing among the pagodas in highly acrobatic style. Analogous to England before the Industrial Revolution: robust young shepherds and rosy-cheeked milkmaids singing and dancing the hours away once they’d taken care of their trivial farm chores.
@ Hat: But you don’t run a blog where you come across as a “narrow-minded jerkass”, at least to most people.
Shen Yun are a performing arts offshoot of Falun Gong, a despicable outfit who has gotten way too much sympathy, for being persecuted by an even more despicable and powerful outfit (the government of the PRC, that is). I shake my head at seeing that such an intensely homophobic organization gets to do their extravaganza at the San Francisco Opera house, year after year.
Europe has nothing to do with it. German* is as diverse and as old as the entire Slavic family; the sociolinguistic difference is the Dachsprache – something Chinese has had for some 2500 years now, and German for 500, but Slavic never.
* Fun fact: nothing about this changes if you include Dutch, aka the rest of Low Franconian and the rest of Central Franconian.
That’s apparently his personality: he gets smitten very easily by a lot of things. Just yesterday – check out the first paragraph of this post: it’s completely irrelevant to the rest of the post, but Mair seems to confuse his emotions about the topic with his emotions about an apparently very well written (but factually very deficient) book on a vaguely overlapping topic – and presents them as emotions about the author of that book.
Never just assume that people will notice implications that aren’t spelled out. Most will, most of the time, but…
But that is just applying European models where they don’t NECESSARILY apply.
Yes, you misunderstood my brief comment (written hastily, I might add). The Chinese take on this might be: “Yes, but you Europeans have your closely related languages that happened to become encoded as little national languages, all written in spelling variants that may not be comprehensible to people speaking other national languages. That’s not relevant to China.” I was (partly) being tongue-in-cheek.
Never just assume that people will notice implications that aren’t spelled out. Most will, most of the time, but…
I assumed that Mair would instantly recognise Chinese aggression when he saw it and extrapolate to the present day. Instead he failed to make the connection and dwelt lovingly on history. Also, the process by which it got to Mair wasn’t straightforward (I don’t remember the details) and the aggression aspect was pointed out to him.
@Hat … for the overwhelming majority of English speakers. I spend half my time on Russian, for chrissake, but when I see “CCCP” in an English context I mentally say “see-see-see-pee.”
The “overwhelming majority of English speakers” would never have seen that initialism — I guess perhaps on tracksuits at the Olympics(?) And would not know what it referred to. I’ve not heard any other than the Russian/cold-war-aware even try to pronounce it.
It’s only by accident those particular Cyrrilic letters are the same shape as Latin.
As a leftist (at school European History 1870 – 1945) at first I said “you-ess-ess-arr”; then it was natural to stick to the last three letters — as did my fellow leftists. I’m surprised it wasn’t the same for you as a Russianist.
previously at the Hattery
@David L, Y: When my daughter and I went to see Shen Yun, we were unaware it was affiliated with Falun Gong. In fact, we were both expecting something with an obviously pro-P. R. C. stance. (I think it was that very conversation in which she told me it was preferable to say “C. C. P.”) We were obviously rather surprised by the dance number about Falun Gong supporters being murdered by the state so their organs could be harvested. The don’t show excepts from that routine in the ads!
“German* is as diverse and as old as the entire Slavic family;”
And do you fight the myth about German language?
Beryllium and all its compounds, emerald included, are poisonous.
out of idle curiosity*, are there other gemstones i shouldn’t lick?
the Dachsprache – something Chinese has had for some 2500 years now, and German for 500, but Slavic never.
how does church slavonic fit in? was it always too distant from local languages to be available as a Dach? or strictly liturgical in ways that mean it wasn’t in significant spoken use?
do you fight the myth about German language?
personally, i tend to contrast dutch and bavarian, and quote weinreich. (and i treasure my friend who’s a native listener of both a black forest lect and a far western lect from north of the -k(-) line – and who these days mostly speaks a delicious new zealand-via-québec english and a montréalais french with a dash of joual)
.
* really! i do have a little stash of rubies in my dresser, but they’re lab-grown, and small enough that i wouldn’t feel comfortable putting them near my mouth.
One of the other rejected element names on the page is phtore (fluorine), as seen previously at Language Hat.
I believe Lavoisier had ‘phlogisticated air’ for Nitrogen and ‘deophlogisticated air’ for Oxygen.
It’s a shame no one named an element in honour of Lavoisier himself.
Here are some element-like names for non-elements that i’ve come across in 19th century books and possibly Wikipedia:
Aether, symbol: A. Hungarian name: üreny
Caloric. German name: Wärmestoff
Phlogiston. German name: Brennstoff
Nebulium / nebulum / nephelium. Turned out to be ionised oxygen.
Coronium / newtonium. Turned out to be ionised iron.
Gnomium. Postulated but never discovered.
Davyum
Wasium
Decipium
Berzelium
….
The Lost Elements book is the source that the Compound Interest page used, and unfortunately, the error about “the amino acid glycine” is in the book (though the other mistakes are the blogger’s). I wonder if this is a garbled transmission of the actual earliest known objection to the name glucine, in 1799 (almost immediately after the name was coined), which was that it was eigentlich (‘actually, properly’) glycine and that name was already in use, not for an amino acid yet, but for a plant family: it’s the genus containing the cultivated soybean, Glycine max. For exact reference, see this paper from Foundations of Chemistry: “Name game: the naming history of the chemical elements—part 1—from antiquity till the end of 18th century” (2022). (Unfortunately, this paper also repeats Wikipedia’s error about Wöhler being the first to use “beryllium”!)
It doesn’t seem too surprising to me that biochemists adopted “glycine” for the amino acid without bothering about the existing “glucine”, since the inorganic compound isn’t relevant to them; nobody would work with both. The soybean genus name doesn’t seem to get in the way, either. Even so, I like “beryllium” better because it’s more specific.
how does church slavonic fit in? was it always too distant from local languages to be available as a Dach? or strictly liturgical in ways that mean it wasn’t in significant spoken use?
The answer has several layers: 1) It never was a pan-Slavic Dachsprache, as its use was mostly limited to the Orthodox areas. 2) For a couple of centuries, it was indeed the only or main written language in several orthodox Slavic-speaking areas, but it quickly developed regional redactions for the traditional “national” churches, which is why Slavicists speak of Russian CS, Serbian CS, Bulgarian CS. 3) At least in Russia (I’m not so familiar with the other CS-speaking areas) there was always a competition from a (often heavily CS-influenced) vernacular for writing in non-religious/theological spheres (economic texts, contracts, chronicles). With the advent of the modern nation state (which happened earlier in Russia than in other CS-using areas), when non-religious writing became a far more significant portion of writing than religious writing, the vernacular squeezed out CS, even if it stayed under CS influence for a long time (a lot of the developments and debates wrt Russian literary language in the late 18th and early 19th century are about reducing CS influence). AFAIK, in Serbia and Bulgaria these developments happened somewhat later, in line with modern nationalism; also with a romantic turn towards the vernacular and at least partially consciously influenced by Russian.
If you ask me, one of the reasons why CS didn’t play the role of Latin or literary Arabic as a Dachsprache even for the Orthodox area for long was the fact that the Orthodox church was much less centralized and the relative autonomy of the autokephalous national churches, plus the absence of a principle that there was only one holy language.
I guess perhaps on tracksuits at the Olympics(?)
The Soviet soccer team’s jersey had “CCCP” across the chest until some time between Euro 88 and World Cup 1990. I don’t think FIFA allows such inscriptions on national team shirts any more; which is odd, given that club team kits are plastered with ads and FIFA is not generally averse to commercialism.
then it was natural to stick to the last three letters
As in “SSR”? The USSR was a union of SSRs (including one SFSR), any of which was “an SSR”, whereas “the SSR” was the Slovak Socialist Republic.
Most North Americans over the age of 40 know „CCCP“ from the Soviet Ice Hockey jerseys. The letters were not as prominent on the basketball jerseys, and I don’t recall as a child that we cared about the soccer competition in the Olympics at all. Or even knew soccer was in the Olympics. I suspect ABC televised whatever event America was likely to win medals in instead.
@rozele, Hans, I believe that in the sense that we need the answer is yes, Slavonic was a Dachsprache. As for “spoken use” I don’t know, but Wenyan, Latin and literary Arabic are not spoken langauges either.
It kept our varieties from drifting.
The complications are
(1) West Slavs
(2) Existence of the continuum Slavonic-mixed language-local literary variety (affected by Slavonic).
In Arabic there is a diglossic continuum in speech, but you write in literary Arabic, its modern version, unless it is a religious text which can be more classicised.
I can comfortably read in Slavonic-Serbian (“It was a linguistic blend of Church Slavonic of the Russian recension, vernacular Serbian (Shtokavian dialect), and Church Slavonic of the Serbian recension, with varying sources and differing attempts at standardisation”) and I don’t know what’s the origin (apart of Slavonic) of the langauge of Rusyn books of 19th centrury but it is fully intelligible to me, despite many local grammatical features (and some Hungarian loans…).
Not the language of Dostoyevsky, but a langauge I understand whose readers likely could understand our books as well – depending on the register.
Yesterday I listened to a video in Bulgarian, and it was funny: it feels like code-switching. He speaks Russian then some strange dialect with different stress and lexicon, then Russian then a strange dialect…
Of course there was influence of Russian literature on Bulgarian AND influence of Slavonic literature on both.
Also note that IF we all wrote in Old Russian, Old Czech and so on, the effect would be that of a shared Dachsprahe. Because: no matter how you call Old Czech, 1000 years ago it was mutually intelligible with Old Russian, and when people use mutually intelligibile different langauges, it is quite the same as using the same pluricentric langauge.
The “overwhelming majority of English speakers” would never have seen that initialism
Now? Probably true. Back in the day? Not true at all of that portion of English speakers that paid any attention at all to world news and/or international sports. Every time they showed anything Soviet it was likely to have CCCP plastered on it in large letters, as of course did the competitors at the Olympics and other such events (where the Soviets were always a prominent competitor). Long before I learned any Russian I, like my friends (and of course my parents and that whole WWII generation), was well aware of CCCP, and we all pronounced it see-see-see-pee — how else could we have said it? I don’t even know if we knew it was the equivalent of USSR; probably, but it wouldn’t have occurred to us to make the substitution, any more than it would have occurred to us to look at “Deutschland” and read it aloud as “Germany.”
previously at the Hattery
Where J.W. Brewer said “were I to have occasion to say it aloud, I would say see-see-see-pee.”
” and we all pronounced it see-see-see-pee ”
Which I read as вижу, вижу, вижу, ссу…
Somebody even taught me how to read it out: “Sovyetskiy soyuz sotsialistetniski respubliki”. It’s strange what your brain will keep stashed. (And of course the Internet now has resources to prove me right or wrong, but it’s a true fact that that is how I remember it. If there were palatalized consonants in there, I probably couldn’t tell).
Olympic soccer was typically boring even if you liked soccer because of the old “amateurism” ideal and the fact that it was the sort of sport where pretty much anyone with any talent was already playing for money before they were out of their teens. Except in the Soviet bloc where everyone pretended their government-payroll professional athletes were “amateurs” for some sort of Cold War realpolitik reasons I’m not sure I follow. More recently Olympic soccer has permitted vulgar professionals but only if they are below some cut-off age like 22 or 23 – so as not to have anyone think that an Olympic gold medal is comparable to winning the World Cup. But during the Cold War days there were very few Olympic events that the CCCP was not competitive in (they’d outsourced a few things to the DDR, I guess …) so you couldn’t watch Olympic coverage on U.S. tv and not see athletes with CCCP on their outfits.
@Lars: Either your memory or the person who taught you is / was not reliable; it’s “Soyuz Sotsialisticheskikh Sovyetskikh Respublik”. “Sovyetskiy Soyuz” is the short form, corresponding to “Soviet Union”.
Except in the Soviet bloc where everyone pretended their government-payroll professional athletes were “amateurs” for some sort of Cold War realpolitik reasons I’m not sure I follow
Because officially, they all had “real” jobs at this or that institute or state-owned company, and didn’t take money for participating in sports events, which would have made them professionals. IIRC, Western countries sometimes went for similar ruses in sports that were not greatly professionalized, so that athletes would have to be professionals to compete in serious competitions; I remember that Western Germany had a couple of soldier / police athletes who were freigestellt and allowed to concentrate on their sports careers.
@hans
Re esp.competitors with army jobs, is that still the case with equestrian sports?
Maybe sportsmen in universities are somewhat similar (except that these sportsmen do want the education or at least the degree provided by the university).
Soviet and Western clubs often originated as amateur teams. Locomotiv from Moscow began as a club of a depot, and is still owned by Russian Railways. But yes, I don’t know why in Soviet context specifically the transfromation into a profession could not be official.
Hey, the first ten letters of each word were correct, never mind their order. I think that’s pretty good 23 years later.
At my school (early 80’s in the UK) we had people wandering around with _genuine_ CCCP sports gear (swapped at under-18 international rowing competitions) so the initials were highly familiar – but I am fairly sure almost everyone pronounced as English.
In general, I think the people who ran the Olympics during the Cold War valued universal participation more highly than they valued ensuring Communist-regime compliance with Western-elite notions of sportsmanship, at least if the Communists were willing to pay lip service to those notions while disregarding them in practice. But it may also be the case that certain Western nations used, in more low-profile low-money sports, similar ruses to those that the Commies used in high-profile money sports like basketball and ice hockey, which might have made a clamp-down on those ruses awkward.
@drasvi:
Only if you exclude a good deal of Arabic-language literature since Qantara Alladhi Kafara, pretty much the entirety of Arabic-language social media, and news outlets such as this, which often features content in Moroccan Arabic.
JC made the point quite incisively right here almost a decade ago.
I am not sure what is “high profile” in this case. Is Haile Gebreselassie “high profile”?
A couple of dvi- elements (one of which was dvi-tellurium) were predicted by Mendeleev. You can read about eka- and dvi- elements in e.g.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeleev%27s_predicted_elements
@Alon, and Christian Arabic literature, “Middle Arabic”.
Re esp.competitors with army jobs, is that still the case with equestrian sports?
I have no idea. The high-profile equestrians I know are rather the “wealthy gentlemen (and ladies)” type, so basically what the founders of the Olympics saw as the ideal.
@zyxt: Priestley (not Lavoisier) called oxygen “dephlogisticated air” when he first produced it. Previous discussions here and here.
Separately: Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, my mother bought my a (definitely not genuine) red-and-white “CCCP” sweatshirt. She thought I would think it was funny. I sort of did, but it was not something that I generally felt comfortable wearing except at home or around close friends. I knew plenty of other teenagers wouldn’t understand the reference at all; moreover, of the many that would, only some would understand that I was wearing it ironically while a fair number would undoubtedly think I was just a pro-Soviet tankie.
There was a period in the mid-nineties when early Soviet graphic design was all the rage, like this ad for a Macintosh clone manufacturer.
I should add that CS was also used in Romania for centuries. The oldest known text in Romanian is a letter whose lengthy greeting formula is entirely in CS.
Oh, that’s interesting. The word was coined again and now means “(usually solid) fuel”.
Latin did use to have spoken uses. For example, it was the spoken language at universities in many countries up to the beginning of the 19th century.
@drasvi – starting toward the end of the Eighties the Olympics as a whole simply abandoned the amateur norm, although each sport could opt to hold out. So e.g. overtly professional basketball players first turned up at the Olympics in 1992 but overtly professional boxers not until 2016 (or maybe 2012 with an asterisk). I don’t think the running events held on to the amateur norm any longer than they had to. Outside the Olympics, wikipedia tells me that the Boston Marathon first began offering cash to winners (and eventually other top finishers) in 1986; the New York Marathon not until the new millennium.
The international governing body for running events (among others) eventually did one of those hilarious name changes that preserve the initials, transforming itself from the “International Amateur Athletic Federation” to the “International Association of Athletics Federations,” although I think the name change lagged its enforcement of any restriction on running for filthy lucre by a number of years.
Latin did use to have spoken uses. For example, it was the spoken language at universities in many countries up to the beginning of the 19th century.
Not to mention in Vatican City. I think I did at least one post on modern spoken Latin, but I can’t put my finger on it.
And my friend’s classmates (schoolgirls) used Latin tro ask for directions in Italy.
What else?
Possibly the first sport to abolish the distinction between amateur and professional was cricket. The last Gentlemen v Players match was in 1962.
Speaking of emerald and beryl: the etymology of emerald, previously at Language Hat. Beryl has an interesting history, too: the word goes back to Ancient Greek, and the Greeks imported both the word and the thing from India. AHD:
Wiktionary offers a further detail attributed to Pāṇini himself! Under Sanskrit vaiḍūrya:
Even Pāṇini may not be infallible; I guess today’s etymologists won’t just take his word for it. Merriam-Webster’s summary:
… is taken from a 1944 paper (which they *cite*, hurray! see JSTOR) that goes through all the ancient primary sources and concludes that the placename derivation is likely, but the meaning of the placename is unclear.
CCCP was also often plastered in very big letters on the helmets of the earliest Soviet cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, which is where I remember seeing it as a youth. But then I was more of a space nut than a sports nut.
It was an altitude record in combustion-assisted flight…
I was reading an interesting story about the discovery of hafnium (72) in “The Children’s Newspaper”, issue 702, 24 Feb 1923: https://www.lookandlearn.com/childrens-newspaper/
Apparently Dr. Alexander Scott of the British Museum had a prior claim to discovery. He found a new substance in a sample of sand from New Zealand. However, he didn’t realise it was a new element until a Copenhagen team made their discovery public.
Taking its usual pro-British line, “The Children’s Newspaper” makes this point:
‘The scientists at Copenhagen – a Dutchman and a Hungarian – suggested that the new element should be named hafnium from Hafnia, the old Roman name for Copenhagen; but Dr. Scott, who would seem now to have a prior right to name the element, thinks oceanium would be preferable, as Hafnia has only local associations, and oceanium, after the name of Oceanus, one of the Titans, would indicate the relationship of the new element to titanium.’
the old Roman name for Copenhagen
I’m pretty sure that’s not in Ptolemy.
Havn was upgraded from just another fishing village (mentioned in the chronicle for 1043) to a trading hub between the cathedral cities of Lund and Roskilde during the 12th, and was gifted to archbishop Absalom around 1186 which lead to greater profitability and eventually becoming the royal and archepiscopal seat. So the Romans had no reason to talk about the place if it even existed then; the Latin name was just what the clergymen of the 11th and 12th came up with. (The Købmannæ part was added after Absalom’s time, it seems, so didn’t make it into Latin).
@RodgerC
Recte dicis.
The question is, would the readership of “The Children’s Newspaper” have picked up on that?
The intended demographic was children of school age.
@zyxt The intended demographic was children of school age.
Really? The bit you quote about Hafnia would have gone in one ear and out the other for me at school age.
Was there a cunning plan to get adults to read the paper to their kids? Then the ‘intended demographic’ wasn’t really the kids at all(?)
The “azo” reference for nitrogen persists in English in the azides. Wikipedia reports that the dominant application of azides is as a propellant in automobile air bags.
Azo dyes, too.
As a non-Russian speaker, but always interested in words, I’m pretty sure I knew that CCCP on spacecraft etc. was the Russian equivalent of USSR (but I don’t suppose I ever had occasion to say it out loud).
I in turn thought that see-see-see-pee is a joke.
I did not know that people actually pronounce it as see-see-see-pee, and grateful to Brett for mentioning it.
I in turn thought that see-see-see-pee is a joke.
Like реникса. But no: the difference is that educated Russians all know the Latin alphabet, whereas hardly any English-speakers know the Cyrillic, so there’s no way they could read CCCP other than see-see-see-pee.
And there is Paul McCartney’s album СНОВА В СССР…
(“the difference is that” – yes, it makes sense. Many Russians did not know English at allin Soviet times: there were other foreign languages taught in school, so one more option for reading Latin alphabet is Russian names of Latin letters. The first 8 letters were known to me since very early age from chess boards. C is “tse” then)
For the first time in the thread, someone (drasvi) has actually input Cyrillic СССР rather than Latin CCCP.
The WP article for the album currently uses Latin, with ongoing debate among editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:CHOBA_B_CCCP
Since that McCartney album was originally a Soviet-only release, presumably the cover designers were using a Cyrillic font. Hilariously enough when it was first released in the UK several years later (since gray-market import copies of the Soviet pressing were selling for high enough prices the UK label couldn’t ignore the economic opportunity) someone hypercorrected the Cyrillic for the album title to СНОВА Б СССР. You can see an image of the cover with that error here: https://www.discogs.com/release/1275847-Paul-McCartney-%D0%A1%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0-%D0%92-%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A0-The-Russian-Album
His name there is hilarious as well.
Only a bit over a third of the capital letters in the current Russian Cyrillic alphabet appear identical (absent super-close inspection) to capital letters in the ASCII Latin alphabet, although obviously frequency-of-use varies considerably from letter to letter so maybe they’re responsible for a higher percentage of total letters used. But I wonder how hard it is (or how statistically unlikely, if you’re not consciously trying) to generate even a three-word sequence like СНОВА В СССР that doesn’t use *any* of the obvious-at-sight non-ASCII Cyrillic letters.
His name there is hilarious as well.
I’m amazed they resisted making the R backwards.
WP has these pictures: link, link and see “other versions” below.
The flip side of Paul McCartiyets is Americans who can’t resist calling a Russian restaurant a pektopah.
@drasvi: I always find it extremely peculiar to see things like W, Þ, or ẞ characterized as “Latin” letters. The label for that image file also has the apparent malapropism of using maximum in place of majuscule. (Teaching separation of variables, it’s handy to know lots of contrasting terms for upper and lower cases.)
One universe away, where the Whites won the Civil War, the ruling party in Russia from 1923 to 1991 was СНОР = Союз Народного Обновления России, Sojuz Narodnogo Obnovlenija Rossii, ‘Union for the National Renewal of Russia’, usually called SNOR in the West, and often applied to the regime generally. Its principles were nationalism, Orthodoxy, anti-Communism (but also anti-capitalism), and pan-Slavism.”’
The world-famous English group NoMoreEagleZ wrote the anti-SNORist song “Far From The S.N.O.R.”, its first international hit. Its opening lyrics are:
Flew in to Virginia Beach, BOAC
Didn’t get to bed last night
Oh, the way the paper bag was on my knee
Man, I had a dreadful flight
I’m far from the S.N.O.R.
You don’t know how lucky you are, boy
Far from S.N.O.R., yeah
I did not understand what they mean by “maximum”:(
Actually I intended to share the second picture, but they have somewhat different lists of other versions below.
It’s complicated, actually, because Russian Н is N.
With time the stroke became horizontal and when they began printing books, they equated it to Latin H.
That’s a font issue. Cyrillic К is more curly than Latin K and Greek Κ in some fonts but not in others.
At that level you also start to see differences between Russian and Serbian majority usages.
@AntC
Well, yes, “The Children’s Newspaper” was meant for the whole family, but its primary audience was children.
The issue i was reading has an article on Abdul Medjid (who had just taken the title of caliph in 1923) and his school-agedaughter. Apparently they read the newspaper avidly and used it to practice English conversation.
They must have been better educated school kids in 1923.
@DM, I did not think about it (that in Latin-based typefaces K is less curly). It’s tempting to connect it to the demise of cursive handwriting but the latter must be a recent development… On the other hand, Cyrillic lower-case letters are unsuitable for handwriting, they simply repeat shapes of capitals and this is not “recent”.
Note also how the downward stroke of K branches out of the upward stroke. cf. К
“curly” makes me imagine К covered with curls….
Obviously an alternate-history fantasy universe is entitled to its own transliteration conventions, but why “Sojuz” rather than “Soyuz” for Союз? Of course my primary childhood association with “Soyuz” was with Communist spacecraft, and presumably a White-ruled Russia might have called their spacecraft something else entirely …
@drasvi
Not too sure what is your definition of “recent” for handwriting…
Yes, the most familiar letterforms in running writing for the Latin/Roman alphabet go back to the Renaissance and are some 2 or 3 centuries older than the currently used Cyrillic running writing.
The cursive cyrillic “grazhdanka” forms go back to the time of Peter the Great. So they’ve been in use some 300 years.
Contrast that with Armenian, where the handwritten forms go back to the 19th century, as far as i can tell.
That, too, is a font issue in both alphabets.
@zixt, English WP has surprisingly little on handwriting.
Apparently I meant the writing style discussed on Block letters and developments discussed here.
I think connected writing – and associated shapes – became somewhat less common a few decades ago? This is what I called “recent”. My idea is that Russians used to see handwritten К often and thus “curly” print capital can be more appealing to them, and my objection to this idea is that many fonts are older than this demist of connected cursive.
Also in Romance and English world K is not a very popular letter….
why “Sojuz” rather than “Soyuz”
The person who wrote that probably was not a native anglophone. I don’t think the transliteration is part of the AU, unlike the transliteration of Japanese (which is based on the orthography of Montreiano, the first language of the Republic of Monterey on the western coast of North America):
In addition, Standard Japanese is based on Quiòto dialect, with influences from other Quiñqui-xù varieties and secondarily from Edo dialect. There are many fewer loanwords, and the ones that exist are mostly from Montreiano (e.g. anima < Mon animaçón), and from Corean, the second language of the Empire.
@drasvi
I see… you were referring to very recent developments.
Fwiw
On the other hand, this is what i had in mind: Here is a link to a work called Slavonic and Wallachian Calligraphy from the 18th century by the Serbian polymath Zaharija Orfelin:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110814225955/http://scc.digital.nb.rs/document/S-II-0887
The Web Archive hasn’t archived the images, except for the thumbnails at the bottom. 🙁
Is this it:
https://digitalna.nb.rs/view/URN:NB:RS:SD_E26B95B7781241EF574569D6C1B1EA1F
Yes, and it’s fascinating.
There’s plenty of Romanian, and the slavenoserbski seems closer to modern Russian than to modern Serbian (at least in part that’s Church Slavonic in both).
2-shaped Д and q-shaped д still occur in Serbia (as opposed to Russia).
Does anybody know what Ѫ was used for in Romanian? It’s introduced as a specifically Romanian letter.
Sorry about the link, and thanks Andrej for finding an alternative link.
@David M
Romanian used it for: în
“Slavenoserbski” was the Serbian literary language. It contained many OCS and Russian elements, mainly in the vocabulary. At the time, it was considered that there are high, middle and low styles. The high style contained more OCS elements.
“Slavenoserbski” was the usual language of the middle and upper classes and anyone with an education right up to the time when the reforms of Vuk Karadžić and his followers were adopted in Serbia in the 1860s.
Oh, it didn’t occur to me that that’s the same letter… it ended up shaped like 个! At least that explains why there’s something hovering above the 个 shape in the book.
A correction….
It’s more equivalent to î and â in modern Romanian.
There aren’t always 1 to 1 equivalents between the old Romanian cyrillic and modern Romanisn latin alphabets, though.
Just re American exposure to “CCCP,” I see from the “memories” section of my facebook account that shortly before this date in 2012 I saw (and photographed) a Porsche with the Connecticut vanity license plate “CCCP,” just over 30 years after the formal demise of the regime thus denoted. Obviously owned by a (former?) member of the nomenklatura!
@J.W. Brewer: There’s got to be a typo in one of those numbers. I assume it’s supposed to be “2022” and “30,” not “2012” and “20”?
And plenty more still in naming schemes of organic nitrogen compounds: azines (and the inorganic hydrazine H₂NNH₂), azirines, azetidines, azoles, hydrazones…
Recent notable progress in the development of a countermeme has been the identification of chips with a /pasno sneeze/ flavor.