It has about 5. Periyodik tablodaki elementlerin resimleri Turkish: Official language of Turkey and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. Traditionally written with the Arabic script. The Chinese government introduced a Roman script in , but the Arabic script was reintroduced in , and the Cyrillic script currently used in the former Soviet Union.
Unsurlarning davriy jadvali Uzbek: Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. The Latin script has been officially re-introduced, although the use of Cyrillic is still widespread most of the 'new' element names are transcriptions from the Cyrillic names in Russion. Taula periodikoa elementu kimikoak Basque: Official language of Georgia. Written in mkhedruli "military" script. Arabic is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than million people as a first language, most of whom live in the Middle East and North Africa, and by million more as a second language.
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Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel. Written in Hebrew script. It-tabella perjodika tal-elementi Maltese: Semitic language spoken by Maltese people and the national language of Malta. It is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet. Hakka or Kejia is one of the main subdivisions of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the Hakka people and descendants in diaspora throughout East and Southeast Asia and around the world.
Japonic language spoken mainly in Japan. The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: Official language of Korea, both South and North. Written in Hangul, the Korean alphabet 78 million speakers. Official language of Thailand. Written in the Thai alphabet.
Official language of Vietnam. Language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees.
Talaang Peryodiko sa mga Elementong Kimikal Cebuano: Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines. About 20 million speakers. The names of the elements are based on Spanish. Susunan Berkala Unsur-unsur Indonesian: Indonesian is a standardized dialect of Malay, official language of Indonesia. Eastern Polynesian languages, the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand ca. Jadual Berkala Unsur Malay: Language of Malaysia and Brunei, lingua franca of the Malay Archipelago. Over million speakers.
Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Puducherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore. Tamil is written its own script. Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Congo-Kinshasa and a large part of the Republic of the Congo Congo-Brazzaville.
Foreign Language Translation of Chemical Nomenclature by Computer
Dielemente tsa tafole ya periodiki Sesotho: Sesotho or Southern Sotho, a Bantu language spoken primarily in South Africa, where it is one the 11 official languages, and in Lesotho, where it is the national language. At least 5 million speakers. Mfumo radidia wa elementi Swahili: Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastline from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, including the Comoros Islands. Swahili is also a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo million speakers.
Collectively they are spoken by an estimated 1. Native American language family spoken primarily in the Andes of South America. Periodiki Sistemi fu den Elementi Sranan Tongo: Creole language spoken as a lingua franca by approximately , people in Suriname. Perioda tabelo de la elementoj Esperanto: Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. The periodic table of the Atomic Elements Atomic Elements: 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.
- "periodic table of the elements" translation into French!
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- Elements in many languages - Elementymology & Elements Multidict.
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.
Language Log » Names of the chemical elements in Chinese
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. Another example failure with translations to and from Japanese is caused by the many-to-one mapping of katakana.
- Elementymology & Elements Multidict.
- 51 Comments.
- Unusual chemical symbols in English.
- Endangered, Dormant and Extinct Languages;
- The Meanings Behind 20 Chemical Element Names | Mental Floss.
- Foreign Language Translation of Chemical Nomenclature by Computer.
In this case, one possible workaround might be to use alternate katakana variants to resolve the ambiguity. For example, the company ChemBlink provides searchable online databases, providing names of its products in both English and Chinese. The left-hand column contains the input phrase, and the right-hand column contains the result. The strange typography inappropriate spaces reflects the actual results returned. On this almost trivial test set, Lexichem perfectly translates all of the compound names giving the expected names given in the left-hand column. Presumably, the software assumes that English and German names are delimited by spaces and uses dictionary-based approaches to perform the actual translation.
Even when translating from Japanese, the software suffers from the difficult vowel elision rules and unusual character composition of IUPAC names. We finish with an example of economic value to the pharmaceutical industry. The Japanese Patent Office http: Taking as an example, a patent recently filed by Osterhout and Roschangar from GlaxoSmithKline, Japan-ese Patent Number , the exemplified compound being claimed in claim number 8 is given in Japanese as.
The correctness of the translation can be confirmed in this case by comparing to the equivalent U. Software, and especially machine-translation software, is like poetry and never really finished. Undoubtedly, many improvements can be made to the currently supported languages as problematic names and bugs are reported. Newly discovered elements these days are named in English after people: Bohrium, Rutherfordium, Fermium, Einstenium, etc.
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The first thing we may say about the names of the chemical elements in Chinese is that every single one of them is monosyllabic. This actually causes great problems for Chinese chemists and other scientists, as well as the lay public, since there are so many homophones and near-homophones among them and with other monosyllabic words not on the list.
Listening to a lecture or holding discussions that mention chemical elements and hearing the elements referred to by these monosyllabic names is challenging, to say the least. They just don't stand out the way, say, "chlorine" and "hydrogen" do. In terms of the classification of the elements by state solid, liquid, gas, unknown and type metals [alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, lanthanoids, actinoids, transition metals, post-transition metals], nonmetals [halogens, noble gases, other nonmentals] , and metalloids, the division according to character radicals into metal, gas, stone, and water is not accurate.
Only a few of the characters for the elements existed in premodern times e. Most of the characters for elements that were isolated during the Industrial Age or discovered more recently have had to be invented from scratch to transcribe the sound of the initial part of the name of the element in Western languages. These characters serve no other purpose than to designate the elements in question, and a number of them do not exist in electronic fonts. Unicode strives to add these newly created characters to the higher levels of its latest versions, but there is always naturally going to be a time lag between the creation of new characters and the time they are actually implemented in Unicode.
In addition, as more and more new elements are being discovered, chemists in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere have not yet devised any character for several of them. And that brings up the matter of multiple characters for the same elements and multiple readings for the same characters in Taiwan and China see the list below. After receiving Mike's message, I set about doing the necessary research to answer Zack's questions. I was both surprised and disappointed by how hard it was to find a simple numerical list giving the following information for each element: Various Chinese versions of the periodic chart of elements were not hard to locate, but they were all unsatisfying in one way or another not well organized, not very legible, incomplete, etc.
In the end, several colleagues helped me devise our own list, which, for now, can only be found here on Language Log. So far as I can tell, it is more comprehensive and up-to-date than any list of Chinese names for the chemical elements that is available anywhere.
Tom Lehrer's elements song And here's the elements song in Japanese. It's all in katakana gairaigo. 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.