Elementymology: The Names of Every Element in Every Language
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- čas přidán 2. 01. 2024
- In this video, Zzineohp got a new mic, so be sure to tell him if the sound quality is good or if you prefer the old one. Also, I will be going over the Etymologies of the Elements: The portmanteau felt pretty self-explanatory but I guess not to everyone.
really cool video, insane research, couple things tho:
(also i'd love to help with future episodes, hit me up, i have nothing going on please)
4:50 - don't think it's a coincidence, considering Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who coined the word was a linguist who spoke German and was probably familiar with other languages that also calqued it
4:53 - the root dus- or duš- actually refers to nitrogen suffocating (dusit/dusiť/душити/dušiti) both fire and living stuff as confirmed by the Czech, Slovak and Serbian wikipedias (although it's true that these roots are related more distantly to the ones meaning "soul"). weirdly, it's unclear whether that is a calque from Stickstoff or azote, since the Czech wikipedia says the former and the Slovak one claims the latter. both articles state the word was coined by Jan Svatopluk Presl, but disagree on whether he translated the French or the German word. since his Czech article has a quote where he allegedly said that he spoke German and the connection to Stickstoff through suffocation being more robust i consider it a calque from German. the Serbian wikipedia just calls it a "slavic name" and doesn't elaborate, but it does also confirm it's connection to choking so that's cool
5:26 - the name has a simple structure, tãch- is the root and /-eń is a common generic meaningless noun suffix in Slavic languages (like /-ень in Russian кремень "flint" whence кремний "silicon" funnily enough). thus the task is to jsut figure out the meaning of tãch-. given that "ã" in Kashubian could come from Proto-Slavic *ǫ, what immediately comes to mind is Proto-Slavic *tǫxnǫti/tuxnǫti "to go out (about fire)" (since nitrogen notably doesn't burn), which promisingly is known to have descendants in other Western Slavic languages. sadly, both in Słownik języka pomorskiego czyli kaszubskiego (1893) and Slovinzisches Wörterbuch (1912) the verbs tąχnọc and tą̃χnȯų̯c (respectively) are translated as "to become musty, to stink" which is a different meaning of the same/similar Proto-Slavic root. it's also an unlikely meaning to be used for an odorless element. i don't think this theory is out of the question (regardless of which meaning was intended), but i found nothing to back it up. another possible origin for tãch could be from Proto-Slavic *duch/duš- "soul/suffocate" with d/t alternation (like in *dǭgà->tãga), but the vowel change doesn't quite check out, so this in my opinion is much less likely. no solid answer here sorry
(5:38 - not to be that guy, but it's Polish, not "Politian" x))
6:04 - this one's easy, it's от (ot) "fire" + тегі (tegi) "origin of", same as hydrogen is сутегі (sutegi) from су (su) "water" + тегі (tegi) "origin of". some variants end in -тек (-tek), which is just "origin" instead of "origin of". but i like the insane claim that it could just be from "oxygen" x)
6:14 - ok, according to Diccionario quechua-español (2005) muki or mukiy can mean "suffocation" (at least in some Quechua dialects), so I assume the full name means something along the lines of "unsuffocation gas" as in "gas that makes it so that you don't choke and die", but i found no real proof for it. there is a chance that maybe it does just mean "suffocation gas" and it was intended as the name for nitrogen, but misasigned to oxygen because of how similar "muksichaq" and "oxygen" sound, but that's also completely speculative
8:12 - i'm guessing that Kurds had a name for Aluminium before they had to come up with a scientific term, so they just kept using it. i couldn't find related words to it in Kurdish languages or other languages they it could have been borrowed from like Arabic. given the lack of resources i doubt there is much we can figure out about the origin of this word
(8:42 - that is pronounced /krʲemnʲɪj/ and not /krʲemnʲɪk/)
9:56 - in Мокшень-рузонь валкс (1993) the word толгев (tolgev) is defined as "flint (very hard rock)", so that's still not really silicon, i'm deeply sorry. however, Russian wiktionary does say that атаем (atajem) means specifically "silicon", it was added by a trusted wiktionary contributor, though it sadly doesn't list any sources. i studied several Mokshan dictionaries, but couldn't figure out where this word comes from even a little bit.
10:50 - according to one of the most niche works i've ever looked at aka Этимологический словарь мордовских языков (2006) or "Etymological dictionary of Mordvinic languages" the word кандор (kandor) "sulphur" has many variants, is "representational/onomatopoeic" and apparently supposed to represent the sound of a cracking cartilage (it also means "cartilage" in some dialects). i'd say you're welcome, but i don't think you wanted to know this information. and no, the book doesn't have anything about silicon, sorry
11:11 - i'll take a look at these later and let you know if i figure anything out, can't be asked rn tbh, i've done quite a bit of research for one day
Couple of things: so,
1. I said "Polish and" not "Politian"
2. The source I was using for verifying Moksha words is available here:(web.archive.org/web/20120225003547/xerius.jergym.hiedu.cz/~canovm/vyhledav/varian17/moksa_c.html)
It's also the same one that the website uses (although the website was referencing the Latin table, not the Cyrillic), and it was created by a man named Jarmanj Turtash, who claims to be a native speaker of Moksha on wikipedia and wikimedia.
3. I would love your help on part 2, how can i reach out to you?
@@zzineohp i think the bot protection deletes comments that say stuff like that, i'll put it in my channel bio
Yes, the root morpheme duch- has a lot of derivations in many Slavic languages. In Slovak for example there are:
duša (soul), duch (ghost), dych (breath), dýchať (to breathe), dochnúť (to die), zdochlina (animal corpse), dusiť (to choke, suffocate), vzduch (air), vzdychať (to sigh), dúchať (to blow), duchna (duvet), dúšok (sip) and more
Can we just criticize how little effort he puts into these videos?
bro why did you comment on your own video
No because it isn’t true
8:13 this word is also used in the dialect of Arabic that I speak so I did a quick Google search in Arabic for the etymology of the word and apparently, the word ultimately derives from Cantonese 白銅 (baak6 tung4) meaning "white copper" which was then rendered in German as paktong/pakfong then it was loaned into ottoman turkish and became fakfon and from there it spread into Kurdish and some dialects of Arabic.
Slight correction: Portuguese uses "azoto" for nitrogen, though "nitrogénio" is also used.
Another small notice: Maltese didn't borrow from Arabic, it inherited it. Maltese is derived from some form of Arabic.
The essay "Uncleftish Beholding" by Poul Anderson includes a great many names for elements in Anglish, ranging from waterstuff and sunstuff to ymirstuff, aegirstuff, and helstuff. Sadly, it doesn't include most of them, but it also covers other ground such as atoms and electrons, or rather unclefts and bernstonebits. Highly recommended.
"all 94 languages"
man, there are 7139 officially known languages
i didn't make the website
Very well-made video but I want to point out that most of Korean element names mentioned here are not loanwords, at least not in the common sense: back when Korean still used Chinese characters like what Japanese does now, they can just copy the characters and pronounce them with as in their own language, thus the obvious sound differences. This is called an orthographic borrowing, and actually most east asian languages using characters do this (as another example, for silicon it was not the Chinese finding a character similar in pronunciation to Japanese kei, it was the Japanese finding a character pronounced kei and Chinese then borrowed that). Also I think you mistook the Japanese/Korean word of chlorine for oxygen
4:56
That probably means "to choke" as well, since the word for soul comes from the word for breath or wind in Slavic languages.
Upd: nevermind you corrected it in the second part, you make cool videos haha
I knew Japanese phosphorus since there is a touhou character (Kaenbyou Rin) and the kanji used to spell "Rin" is the one for phosphorus.
Enrapturing video. Phenomenal.
i just wanna say your videos are very good at showing obscure and interesting parts of languages ! gonna put some in my conlangs for sure
This is a cool video! I have decided you have gone from interesting to interesting.
an error i noticed is at 4:40, turkish also uses azote. other than that, this video was pretty good
actually the Swedish word for carbon is not a calque of 'coal stuff', it's 'kol' which just means coal
Sulfur in the Chinese languages is (reasonably) native: The Chinese University of Hong Kong's dictionary says that 《玉篇．石部》：「硫，硫黃，藥名。」 Yukpin • ROCK section: "S, sulfur, name of drug."
The Yukpin is a pronunciation dictionary from 543, so the Chinese word for sulfur has been attested since 543. Additionally, CUHK has an image taken from a Sung Dynasty work depicting ancient characters, so it *might* be older, but there have been dictionaries that included fake old characters, so you never know.
Obviously this doesn't exclude ancient loans.
(before watching) Gadolinium's gonna be the longest part of this video
slight correction: poland uses "aluminium" to that element
Make a video explaining the ipa from top down (please do it before my I start my ling110 class)
For oxygen in kazakh language. I don't speak kazakh but as far as I know ot is fire in kazakh so ottek seems to be related to fire like the thing which fire needs?
yes it means the Origin of Fire, i updated that in part 2
Ot means fire
Tegi means surname
If you wonder why Japanese loaned or calqued so many names from Dutch, for about 250 years, Japan was shut off from all outside countries except for the Netherlands, so their knowledge of science and the outside world came all from the Dutch.
0:56 that uhh, questionable Japanese word is actually in turn derived from english as a combination of Lolita (yes, the book) and complex (conplex in japanese)
i'm well a ware; I made a video on it
@@zzineohp shame on me for not checking your channel enough.
It's hilarious that calque is a loanword and loanword is a calque
5:14 Lmao you butchered that character- But seriously great video!
Nahuatl is the only language to use the tl sound, and it's almost like they knew it, cause they use the fuck out of it.
They're not the ONLY language to use that sound, but they sure did perfect it
If the Lithuanian word is based on a Russian word Lithuanian hasn't loaned from Russian but borrowed from Russian.
Languages should start calquing words instead of borrowing as that preserves the language and also allows people to understand the word.
How is a a Hindi speaker to know that Hydrogen is that which makes water if it is a Greek word? Better to calqué as that also fits the language grammar and children can understand the concepts early on.
Video is wrong, in Albanian we can use nitrogjen..... but we use azot 98% percent of the time. Wonder if there are other languages that have multiple words for the elements, have one of those displayed in the periodic table but you ended up using another more obscure word when making the video as you mistook this obscure word as the only name for this particular element in this language.
English has the archaic terms brimstone and quicksilver for sulfur and mercury.
Now you just made my day by randomly also bringng in Võro, it's one of my native languages and really doesn't get enough attention