Chemical elements in East Asian languages

While most East Asian languages use—or have used—the Chinese script, only the Chinese language uses logograms as the predominant way of naming elements. Native phonetic writing systems are primarily used for element names in Japanese (Katakana), Korean (Hangul) and Vietnamese (chữ Quốc ngữ).

Chinese

In Chinese, characters for the elements are the last officially created and recognized characters in the Chinese writing system. Unlike characters for unofficial varieties of Chinese (e.g., written Cantonese) or other now-defunct ad hoc characters (e.g., those by the Empress Wu), the names for the elements are official, consistent, and taught (with Mandarin pronunciation) to every Chinese and Taiwanese student who has attended public schools (usually by the first year of middle school). New names and symbols are decided upon by the China National Committee for Terminology in Science and Technology.

Native characters

Some metallic elements were already familiar to the Chinese, as their ores were already excavated and used extensively in China for construction, alchemy, and medicine. These include the long-established group of "Five Metals" (五金) — gold (金), silver (銀/银), copper (銅/铜), iron (鐵/铁), and tin (錫/锡) — as well as lead (鉛/铅) and mercury (汞).

Some non-metals were already named in Chinese as well, because their minerals were in widespread use. For example,

• boron (硼) as part of borax
• carbon (碳) in the form of charcoal
• sulfur (硫) had been used to make gunpowder since at least the 10th century in China.

Characters based on European pronunciations

However, the Chinese did not know about most of the elements until they were isolated during the Industrial Age. These new elements therefore required new characters, which were invented using the phono-semantic principle. Each character consists of two parts, one to signify the meaning and the other to hint at the sound:

The semantic (meaning) part is also the radical of the character. It refers to the element's usual state at room temperature and standard pressure. Only four radicals are used for elements: 釒/钅 (jīn "gold; metal") for solid metals, 石 (shí "stone, rock") for solid non-metals, 水/氵 (shuǐ "water") for liquids, and 气 (qì "gas, air") for gases.

The phonetic (sound) part represents the character's pronunciation and is a partial transliteration of the element's name. For each element character, this is a unique phonetic component. Since 118 elements have been discovered, over 100 phonetic components are used in naming the elements. Because many characters in modern Chinese are homophones, including for tone, two different phonetic components can be pronounced the same. Current practice dictates that new names should avoid being homophonous with previous element names or with organic functional groups. However, this rule was not rigorously followed in the past, and confusingly, the names of tin (锡) and selenium (硒) both have the pronunciation xī with the same tone. The alternative pronunciation xí for tin is recommended by the National Committee for Approval of Terms in Science and Technology (全国科学技术名词审定委员会).

锡 (tin) and 硒 (selenium) are not homophones in Nanjing Mandarin, which was the prestige dialect of Chinese when most elements were named, which was until the late 19th century. The phonetic component of 锡, 易 (yì), was accurate when the character was invented around 3000 years ago, but not now because of sound change. In Middle Chinese 锡 was an entering tone character, a closed syllable ending in -p/-t/-k (or -ʔ in some modern dialects). But 硒 was constructed in the late 19th century using the (still accurate) phonetic 西 (xī), which in Middle Chinese was a level tone character, an open syllable with a vowel ending. In Beijing Mandarin, the variety on which Standard Modern Chinese is based, stop consonant endings of syllables were dropped, and the entering tone was merged into the other tones in a complex and irregular manner by the 16th–17th centuries, and 锡 and 西 both became Tone 1 (high tone) characters. In dialects that preserve the entering tone, like Nanjing Mandarin and Shanghainese and Cantonese, 锡 retains a -k or -ʔ ending and 锡 and 西 (硒) are pronounced differently.

This sometimes causes difficulty in verbal communication, as Sn and Se can both be divalent and tetravalent. Thus, SnO₂ 二氧化锡 and SeO₂ 二氧化硒 would be pronounced identically, as èryǎnghuàxī, if not for the variant xí for 锡. To avoid further confusion, P.R.C. authorities avoided using the name 矽 xī (or any tonal variants) for silicon. (In Taiwan 矽 is pronounced xì.)

† 內/内 is primarily pronounced as nèi, but less commonly as nà, the source of 納/纳. Likewise, the primary pronunciation of 弟 is dì, but the alternate reading of tì gave rise to 銻/锑.

* The derived pronunciation differs (in tone or in sound) from the pronunciation of the element.

The "water" radical (水) is not used much here, as only two elements (bromine and mercury) are truly liquid at standard room temperature and pressure. Their characters are not based on the European pronunciation of the elements' names. Bromine (溴), the only liquid nonmetal at room temperature, is explained in the following section. Mercury (汞), now grouped with the heavy metals, was long classified as a kind of fluid in ancient China.

Meaning-based characters

A few characters, though, are not created using the above "phono-semantic" design, but are "semantic-semantic", that is, both of its parts indicate meanings. One part refers to the element's usual state (like the semanto-phonetic characters), while the other part indicates some additional property or function of the element. In addition, the second part also indicates the pronunciation of the element. Such elements are:

Usage in the nomenclature for simple inorganic compounds

Simple covalent binary inorganic compounds E_mX_n are named as

n X 化 (huà) m E (with n and m written as Chinese numerals),

where X is more electronegative than E, using the IUPAC formal electronegativity order. 化 as a full noun or verb means 'change; transform(ation)'. As a noun suffix, it is equivalent to the English suffixes -ized/-ated/-ified. It is the root of the word 化学 (huàxué) 'chemistry'.

For example, P₄S₁₀ is called 十硫化四磷 (shíliúhuàsìlín) (literally: 'ten sulfur of four phosphorus', 'decasulfide of tetraphosphorus'). As in English nomenclature, if m = 1, the numerical prefix of E is usually dropped in covalent compounds. For example, CO is called 一氧化碳 (yīyǎnghuàtàn) (literally: 'one oxygen of carbon', 'monoxide of carbon').

However, for compounds named as salts, numerical prefixes are dropped altogether, as in English. Thus, calcium chloride, CaCl₂, is named 氯化钙 (literally: 'chloride of calcium'). The Chinese name for FeCl₃, 氯化铁, literally means 'chlorinated iron' and is akin to the archaic English names 'muriated iron' or 'muriate of iron'. In this example, 氯 is 'chlorine' and 铁 is 'iron'.

There is a Chinese analog of the -ic/-ous nomenclature for higher/lower oxidation states: -ous is translated as 亚 (yà, 'minor; secondary'): for example, FeCl₂ is 氯化亚铁 and FeCl₃ is 氯化铁. In a four-way contrast, hypo- is translated as 次 (cì, 'inferior; following') and per- is translated as 高 (gāo, 'high, upper'). For example, the acid HClO is 次氯酸 "inferior chlorine acid", HClO₂ is 亚氯酸, HClO₃ is 氯酸, and HClO₄ is 高氯酸. In this example, the character 酸 (suān, 'sour') means (organic or inorganic) acid. The more modern Stock nomenclature in which oxidation state is explicitly specified can also be used: thus, tin(IV) oxide (SnO₂) is simply 氧化锡(IV).

Recently discovered elements

In 2015, IUPAC recognised the discovery of four new elements. In November 2016, IUPAC published their formal names and symbols: nihonium (₁₁₃Nh), moscovium (₁₁₅Mc), tennessine (₁₁₇Ts), and oganesson (₁₁₈Og).

Subsequently, in January 2017, the China National Committee for Terms in Sciences and Technologies published four naming characters for these elements. The National Academy for Educational Research under the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China on Taiwan published an almost identical list (the only differences being the use of the traditional Chinese metal radical '釒' in place of the simplified Chinese form '钅' for nihonium and moscovium) in April 2017.

For traditional Chinese, nihonium and moscovium were then existing characters; while in simplified Chinese, only moscovium already existed in the Unicode Standard. The missing characters were added to Unicode version 11.0 as urgently needed characters in June 2018. More generally, the characters for the transuranic elements are registered unevenly across Unicode blocks. The elements named before the 1990s are in the Basic Multilingual Plane, but many of the 1964-2000s elements were encoded on the Supplementary Ideographic Plane, mainly in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E.

The Chinese characters for these symbols are:

• Nihonium: Traditional: U+9268 鉨 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-9268 Simplified: U+9FED 鿭 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-9FED (nǐ)
• Moscovium: Traditional: U+93CC 鏌 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-93CC Simplified: U+9546 镆 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-9546 (mò)
• Tennessine: Both Traditional and Simplified: U+9FEC 鿬 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-9FEC (tián)
• Oganesson: Both Traditional and Simplified: U+9FEB 鿫 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-9FEB (ào)

In the periodic table

• v
• t
• e

Names of the chemical elements in Simplified Chinese

Primordial From decay Synthetic Border shows natural occurrence of the element

Pronunciations for some elements differ between mainland China and Taiwan, as described in the article. Simplified characters and mainland Chinese pronunciations are shown above. Some of the characters for the superheavy elements may not be visible depending on fonts.

History

In 1871, John Fryer and Shou Xu proposed the modern convention of exclusively using single characters for element names.