Element 113

 

At the end of December 2015, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced that the seventh row of the periodic table had been completed with the discovery, or synthesis, of four elements (http://iupac.org/discovery-and-assignment-of-elements-with-atomic-numbers-113-115-117-and-118/, 30 December 2015). One of these, element 113, with the place-holder name ununtrium, was the first whose discovery was credited to East Asia, at the Riken institute in Japan. In fine Japanese fashion, Riken took the opportunity to issue a hundred-page manga of the story of the discovery, 113: Shin-Genso Hakken ni Itaru 20-nen no Tatakai (113 新元素発見に至る２０年の戦い, www.riken.jp/~/media/riken/pr/fun/113/comic.pdf)! The element had been found, but what was it to be called?

At the beginning of June 2016, IUPAC announced the chosen names for the four new elements for review (http://iupac.org/iupac-is-naming-the-four-new-elements-nihonium-moscovium-tennessine-and-oganesson/, 8 June 2016). Element 113, for which the name japonium was originally favourite, followed by nipponium (from the Japanese 日本 nippoɴ or nihoɴ ‘Japan’) and rikenium, is to be named nihonium, symbol Nh. I wonder whether nihonium rather than nipponium is due to the fact that the expected chemical symbols Ni and Np are already allocated to nickel and neptunium.

Why is this significant linguistically? Well, elements are one of those few areas where every national language coins a new term or accepts the same coinage approved by an international body, simultaneously. In this case the body in question is IUPAC. The SARS crisis a decade ago showed news events overtaking institutions like the WHO in this process, as for a few weeks different languages came up with different and multiple names before the nations agreed a common name, but even then there were only three working languages in the WHO and different Chinese communities came up with different translations of the English term.

The issue of how nihonium will be pronounced and written in Japanese is clear-cut. It will be nihoniumu and written in katakana as ニホニウム as is usual for loanwords, even though it’s derived from the Japanese word nihoɴ, because the –ium formation is Latinate.

Chinese is rather more complicated. Elements are named with a single syllable word, because that fits the pattern of Chinese, and each element a character that uniquely writes that element and no other word. Because of this, the naming of new elements is the only domain in which brand-new Chinese characters are created nowadays. The principle of character creation for new elements is normally ‹sP›, namely:

a semantographic left-hand side, namely (traditional) 釒or (PRC simplified) 钅 METAL for metals, while for non-metals 气 GAS is used for gasses, 石 STONE for solids, and 氵 WATER for the only room-temperature liquid element, Br bromine

+

a phonographic component. The phonographic component approximates the first syllable of the international name, and the whole character has the same pronunciation as the phonographic component by itself, including tone.

Less recent discoveries may not be not be strictly semantographic + phonographic, e.g. Ge germanium 鍺 [锗] duǒ, because though the left-hand side is 金 METAL, the right-hand side 者 is not pronounced duǒ, but zhě. 鍺 was not a coined character, but a recycled obsolete character whose pronunciation, duǒ was similar to the beginning of Deutsch for German.

However, recent additions to the periodic table, such as Db dubnium 𨧀 dù, Sg seaborgium 𨭎 xǐ, and Lv livermorium 鉝 lì, strictly follow the semantographic + phonographic principle to represent the first syllable, i.e.

‹金 METAL + 杜 dù› =  𨧀  dù  ‘dubnium’

‹金 METAL + 喜 xǐ› =  𨭎  xǐ  ‘seaborgium’

‹金 METAL + 立 lì› =  鉝  lì  ‘livermorium’

(The simplified characters for such as Db, Lv and Sg are in Unicode’s CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E and so cannot be displayed yet.)

So, this raises the interesting question of how Chinese will name and write nihonium, assuming that the latter is approved later this year. The simplest route will be to choose a character whose pronunciation imitates the ni- of the first syllable of nihonium and to combine this with the semantographic component 金 METAL. There are several possible ni-characters. Chinese already has a character based on a first syllable ni, namely 鎳 [镍] niè = Ni nickel.

I wonder if Chinese will reflect the fact that nihonium is named after Japan, geopolitical issues notwithstanding, and take the first character 日 of Japanese 日本 nihoɴ = Chinese 日本 rìběn, and use that as a simultaneously phonographic and semantographic component. Phonographic because it the element would be named rì as a result, and semantographic because of its connection to ‘Japan’. The resulting character would be:

‹金 METAL + 日 rì› =  鈤  rì

Interestingly, 鈤 already exists, and is Unicode-encoded, as it was invented to write the name of an element. The name and the character became obsolete before the PRC’s simplification of characters, so there is as yet no simplified version of 鈤.

The history of 鈤 reflects nineteenth-century and earlier twentieth-century variation in the naming of elements in Chinese. There was originally no global body like IUPAC to standardise names internationally, let alone a national Chinese body. Different authors, and different regions, used different names for elements. There’s a great variation in the Chinese names of many elements between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. For example, Al aluminum was tǔ 釷, is now lǚ 鋁 [铝]; or N nitrogen was yùn (written with a combination of ‹气 + 育› that is not yet available to input), is now dàn 氮. Even now, Np neptunium still has no universally standardised Chinese name. In the PRC, including in Hong Kong, ná 鎿 [镎]  is the word, whereas in Taiwan it is nài 錼 [no simplified version of course], both reflecting the first syllable of neptunium, the characters both being of semantographic + phonographic composition:

‹金 METAL +拿 ná› =  ná  鎿 [镎]  ‘neptunium’

‹金 METAL + 奈 nài› =  nài  錼  ‘neptunium’

I mention neptunium, discovered in 1940, because the name in the west recycled an earlier obsolete name for another element that parallels the history of 鈤. For the history of 鈤 I have to rely largely on Chinese-language Wikipedia and some guesswork, but it seems to be this: It was first created to write element 32, which was discovered in the mid-1880s, and was originally named neptunium, before soon being renamed germanium. 鈤 rì (which dialectally has an initial /n/), was created to write neptunium, and 鍺 duǒ was created to write germanium. Of course, in those days there was no global body to standardise names, let alone a national Chinese body, so probably 鍺 duǒ took its time to supercede 鈤 rì. Then, when Ra radium (element 88), was discovered in 1892, the lack of a national Chinese body to standardise names meant that Chinese originally seems to have sporadically used 鈤 rì for radium, alongside the 鐳 [镭] léi that has since become standard.

I’ve no idea how Chinese will deal with the name nihonium. We’ll find out later in the year. However, it would be very interesting if 鈤, which has already been used a hundred or so years ago to write the names of not one but two elements, and has been rejected for both, were to be revived yet again for element 113.