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Since they did contribute quite a bit to the Table, they probably "feel" they have the right to use their own customized Periodic Table using Cyrillic or Kanji characters.
For example North Korea. Historical precedent combined with the fact that as far as I'm aware the vast majority of scientific literature is published in English are obviously large factors here, but there's no massive incentive for any given scientific user to rock the boat on this, and there's a disincentive to training scientists in a system which would leave them unable to easily read scientific literature even if you're an isolationist liebox like North Korea.
On a side note, Japan in particular recently gained the distinction of having an element synthesised there named after it Nihonium , and while I'm not an active follower of nucleosynthetic proceedings, it wouldn't surprise me particularly if we saw a Chinese-named element some time in the next decade. Both North Korea and South Korea use the periodic table. The names, however, are different. Here is a periodic table in North Korea.
The title translates to "Mendeleev's atomic periodic table. In South Korea Hydrogen is known as and pronounced as soo-saw. Phosphorus is known as and pronounced as in. Potassium is known as and pronounced as kallium. In South Korea Magnesium is known as and pronounced as magnesium.
Argon is known as and pronounced as argon. Fluorine is known and pronounced as fluorine. I haven't taken classes in North Korea or visited any research facilities. But it is likely that they have further modified the names to be "less western". By clicking "Post Your Answer", you acknowledge that you have read our updated terms of service , privacy policy and cookie policy , and that your continued use of the website is subject to these policies.
Kanji characters were borrowed from Chinese over years ago and are used to denote the most common concepts and words in Japanese. Hiragana is used to write words more recently added to Japanese for which there are no kanji characters or occasionally in place of rare or difficult kanji characters. Finally, katakana is used to write foreign words and names loaned from other languages and as a consequence for technical and scientific words. Each katakana character denotes a syllable, much like the characters of the English alphabet denote phonemes.
An abbreviated table of katakana along with their romanization is shown in Table 3. This table may be used to romanize many of the Japanese examples in this article. This demonstrates that a major task of translating from Japanese to English is disambiguating these characters, by making use of their context.
In the periodic table, the prehistoric metals known since antiquity, such as gold Au , silver Ag , lead Pb , iron Fe , copper Cu , and tin Sn , all have kanji characters, while more recent elements such as sodium Na and uranium U are expressed in katakana, which is consistent with their time of addition to the language.
There are also a small number of exceptions for relatively obscure compounds that use kanji characters, often natural products. The Chinese or Sinitic languages are the most spoken language family in the world, with about 1 billion native speakers. Although Chinese consists of several spoken languages, including Mandarin, Wu, and Cantonese, they share the same written form and may be considered a single language for machine-translation of chemical names.
However, since the s, this single written language assumption is no longer entirely accurate. All chemical elements in Chinese are represented by their own character. Indeed this requirement combined with ongoing discoveries of new heavy elements means that symbols for new elements are among the newest symbols to enter Chinese dictionaries. For examples, elements above atomic number were only added as traditional Chinese characters to the Unicode standard with version 3.
Chinese chemical names are perhaps the single exception to the rule that most natural languages use phonetic transliterations of English systematic names. A more significant complication involves the translation of esters between English and Chinese.
Normally, in most natural language translation software it is necessary to perform sentence parsing and deep analysis in order to identify nouns, verbs, and adjectives and from there identify the subject, object, and tense. This allows resolution of ambiguities, such as which of the translations in a dictionary is required. Flowcharts of the described translation process for chemical names. The steps for converting from another language to English are given on the left, and those for converting from English to another language on the right.
The lexical string replacement is performed at the whole name level, identifying tokens or lexemes in an input string, translating them, and composing the results in an output string. This process is completely independent of machinery used to parse or generate names from English words. For example, the language translation functionality is able to translate some names that cannot be parsed or would not be generated by Lexichem or similar software. One useful benefit of combining translation to English with conventional name-to-structure software is that the correctness of the translation can be automatically assessed by the ability of the parser to recognize the translation as a valid chemical connection table.
The drawback with this approach is that a significant number of subtleties when translating between languages do not occur at the token boundaries found in English. The first significant difficulty encountered when translating between languages is the issue of character sets. Historically, while English documents have traditionally been stored in ASCII, the requirements and character sets of other languages have meant that they frequently use their own encodings.
More recently, the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode characters has become more common, allowing the same representation of characters to be shared between languages and even allowing multiple languages to be used in a single document. This allows the code to work internally a single byte at a time on a single canonical character representation.
Another technicality is the potential problem of mixed case. To minimize the number of substitution rules required for language translation, each compound name is converted to lower case prior to pattern matching. Fortunately, Japanese and Chinese do not have a notion of uppercase or lowercase to represent capitalization, but alas the Russian Cyrillic alphabet and Greek alphabets do, as do many of the European accented characters in Latin This requires the appropriate algorithms to perform the transliteration to English lowercase, with the appropriate chemistry-aware checks of which characters are case-sensitive in IUPAC names.
For generating names, the equivalent inverse function exists to capitalizing the chemical name correctly by determining the appropriate character to modify. The core knowledge of the translation process is encoded by a rule file, containing a number of rules, that each specify the pattern string to match in the input string, and the replacement text to use in the output string.
At run-time the translation algorithm proceeds left-to-right over the input string, identifying the longest matching pattern at the current position. If a suitable pattern is found, the replacement text is appended to the output string, and the input is advanced by the number of characters in the matching pattern.
In the Lexichem implementation, the pattern and replacement are separated by one or more TAB characters, allowing spaces to be used in both the pattern and replacement. Although it is theoretically possible to use a single set of rules file for converting from English to language X and from language X to English, in practice it has been found easier to treat translation directions separately and encode the rules independently. This asymmetry allows the Chinese rules to handle both Simplified and Traditional Chinese when translating to English as a single rule set , but only Simplified Chinese is currently supported from English.
As text-mining of large data sets and interactive translate-as-you-type are significant target applications, translation performance is a potential issue. Although it is possible to make the translation process even faster using finite state machines, 33 the current level of speed was considered more than acceptable. Notice that these examples also include appropriate spaces in both the pattern text and the replacement text. Typically, though not always, translating a language to English requires more rules than translating to it from English.
For those languages that use accented Latin characters, the Lexichem To-English rules often contain duplicates to allow both the accented and unaccented forms to be recognized when there is no ambiguity. In some languages a translation may not be unique, in which case the English-To rules contain the single preferred translation, but the To-English rules may recognize multiple forms.
Such an example is the support for both simplified and traditional Chinese characters mentioned previously. Another major factor is how comprehensive the translation support for a language is. Naturally, when allowed by the source and destination languages, common names in one language should be translated as common names in the other. Likewise, systematic names and other distinctions should be preserved. The current approach used by Lexichem is to provide translation rule files for each language to and from English, with the expectation that translation between two foreign languages will go via English as an intermediate.
However, there is no reason why additional rule files, such as from German to Japanese, could not also be used. These are the names generated from the given structures by Lexichem, demonstrating the English-To rules applied to software generated names. One way of evaluating the quality of machine-translation software is by round-trip testing. This standard is perhaps harsher than required in practice, as it is possible for the result to uniquely and unambiguously describe the original chemical structure but be named slightly differently due to native language preferences.
Of course, one aspect that is not covered by round-trip benchmarking is whether the translation is valid in the foreign language. Unfortunately, such evaluations are subjective and are only possible for samples of perhaps a few hundred names. Round-trip testing has the advantage of being automatable across data sets of many millions of compound names.
These numbers also do not reflect the best possible values that are achievable but simply report the current performance given the effort the author has put into each language. Countries and languages that are existing Lexichem customers have had more time invested than those of more academic interest. One conclusion that can be drawn from the round-trip fractions in Table 5 is that the quality of chemical translation is likely to exceed the ability of computer software to correctly interpret the chemical names.
Hence in text-mining applications, such as extracting compounds from foreign patents, the failures due to mistranslation are likely to be rare compared to the failures due to poor name quality or complex chemistry. An open question is what level of accuracy is desired or required of machine-translation software. For text-mining from foreign patents, any success rate is acceptable if previously the contained information could not to be extracted or indexed.
However for authoring patents and legislative documents a very high level of accuracy is required of finished translation. In such usage, machine-translation is a significant productivity tool as it can significantly reduce the time taken to perform and type a manual translation from scratch. An observation that can be made from analyzing some of the remaining failures is that not all of the differences are attributable to issues with the software or methodology.
A number of mismatches are legitimately caused by ambiguities and inabilities to name compounds uniquely with IUPAC rules in the target language. About the Chinese chemical names, I think they created a high learning barrier to anyone who wants to study chemistry in Chinese. As a high school student, I much preferred studying physics rather than chemistry, because I didn't have to confront all these strange Chinese characters. A similar reason for not majoring in chemistry may very well explain why Chinese chemical and pharmaceutical industries are still backward even today.
Such a situation is reflected in poor product quality. Yet another example of how Chinese characters with the idea that they each mean or must mean something on their own create — rather than solve — problems. I am very glad to find a clear exposition of the matter that doesn't glorify the Chinese way to spell the chemical elements.
One common falsehood propagated by defenders of Chinese characters as a writing system is:. Have you ever seen the periodic table? The Chinese names of chemical elements are so … logical! And the names of trees and fish too!
Well, every time I hear nonsense like that I want to scream. Because clearly Chinese nomenclature for chemical elements is nowhere near as systematic as some make it out to be, and as was pointed out above , most are metals anyways, and the rest "it's a gas, well — duh" isn't very illuminating, as in: And even if it worked, the value of knowing something and in fact not very much about the periodic table of elements or that something is a species of tree or fish isn't exactly large and hence doesn't justify that writing system.
And, how often are you in a context where knowing that something is a metal or gas or tree or fish — again, not a lot of information — is really crucial to comprehending something? I mean, in a context that doesn't already make it clear that you're talking about a chemical element or tree or fish? Not that Latin scientific nomenclature is any more lucid, to be fair. May 4, 1: For all practical purposes it was never required to remember the names of any but the two dozen or so most common elements.
The Chinese names were just there to approximate the pronunciation of the Latin names, and people seem to mostly just ignore them in research. The names of fishes are definitely another can of worms. Like the chemical elements, traditionally many characters exist solely for that purpose, and the "fish" radical has many strokes which makes most such characters cumbersome to write. So it's almost like the Japanese situation, except the official spelling is different.
When you say "the short-hand spelling", I assume you're talking about the Latin-alphabet element symbol used in chemical formulas and the like? May 4, 3: It might be interesting to add a column of information about the origin of the Chinese name of each element. In many other cases, the Chinese name was chosen to sound like the start of the English or at least, non-Chinese name. Some are not so obvious. Can anyone spot other homonyms?
May 4, 5: Interestingly, then English name "tungsten" comes from Swedish heavy stone , but the element is actually called "volfram" in Swedish which is a more awesome name, anyway, since it means "wolf froth" , from German. May 4, 6: There's nothing necessary about this. There's no reason not to assemble chinese characters the same way. What one piece of software already does, more software can do in the future. A couple are similar: Several element names are Indo-European borrowings, apparently German: But several others use come from interestingly different Chinese characters: Knowing nothing about ancient construction methods, that doesn't strike me as a very good fit of metal to function!
May 4, 7: A chance to clear a few bookmarks: Aren't we heading toward a universal world language within the next hundred years or so? There should be a Universal periodic table. VHM has even posted a custom character to LL himself…. Yes, I did post that custom character and probably have posted a few others over the years , but it was indeed a custom character.
That means I had to go to special lengths to have it created, and it is not reproducible outside of the context where I presented it. I suppose that people could copy it as a sort of picture, which sometimes happens with weird characters by "weird" I mean that they do not exist in any electronic fonts, including the largest ones.
Such a situation is inconvenient for a science like chemistry, where new characters are occasionally needed. And, as I have pointed out in various Language Log posts, new characters continually pop up in many other areas of culture and science. I hope that Richard Cook, a top researcher at Wenlin Institute and an important consultant on Chinese characters at the Unicode Consortium, will comment on how the creation and implementation of new and rare characters, such as those for recently discovered chemical elements, are handled at Wenlin and Unicode.
If the Korean names of lithium and sodium come from German, it's pretty straightforward for the Korean names for oxygen and hydrogen to come from German too. I don't see any etymological justification for naming chlorine after salt, but it's pretty easy to explain from first principles. You completely missed my point about combining characters. You can type an f-with-acute-accent in unicode despite the fact that it's not specifically supported by a font.
LaTeX will do the same. In order to type a character, it is not necessary for that character to be included in an electronic font. I didn't miss your point. Being able to type characters the way you describe is quite a different kettle of fish, as it were, from being able to transmit them freely through electronic media, which is the issue I originally raised, but which you said is not "necessary". May 4, 8: From German Wikipedia article on nitrogen. Google translate, slightly edited: Somebody else will have to help you with just plain Stick.
Maybe it's connected to stecken , 'to plug'. May 4, 9: Unfortunately, no one has succeeded in accomplishing this so far. All the efforts that produced papers which I know of showed off somehow promising, but also typically rather awkward character shapes and typically, too, you do not often get to see follow-up reports.
Everything's in place but the dynamic production of the displayed shapes.
It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Puducherry. Chemical names can contain sequences of letters not observed in regular text. Chemical nomenclature forms a small but economically significant specialization of technical document translation. A significant complication, however, is that although the vast majority of chemistry uses English nomenclature, a significant fraction is in other languages. May 5,
There were a few papers produced by people at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan in the late 80s and early 90s; one of the envisioned use cases was to dynamically produce subtitles using a "set-top box" a small custom purpose computer that goes between the TV set and the VCR.