Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

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Anthony Appleyard
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Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

Postby Anthony Appleyard » Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:46 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_elements_in_East_Asian_languages is a list of the Chinese names for the chemical elements.

On reading it, a query arose. In English, if, for example. I said or wrote "plutonium" in any context, the meaning of the word would be clear.

But:

If I was writing in Chinese, if I wrote "鈈", it would clearly mean "plutonium" in any context.

But several characters, 鈈 or 不, and some others, are all pronounced (in pinyin) "bù",

Therefore, if I was talking in Chinese, I said "bù", it could mean 鈈, or 不 , or any of several other characters.

How does a Chinese speaker say "plutonium" without ambiguity in any context?
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Re: Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:20 pm

I'm not a Chinese speaker but I imagine it should be very clear from context. You're not going to be talking about the weather and then all of the sudden plutonium comes up, it'll be in a conversation about chemistry or nuclear power or atomic bombs or something like that.

Take this English sentence: "Hey, I heard your basement flooded. Do you have a mold problem?"

It is clear from context that there is a problem with the kind of fungal mold that grows on wet surfaces, and not a problem with an injection mold or a jell-o mold.
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Re: Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

Postby AllSubNoDub » Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:27 pm

"Disambiguation

For metals, one can say 金属<element> ("the metal <element>"). For gases people will often say <element>气, but that strictly speaking denotes the element in the gaseous state. In general, one can say <element>元素 ("the element <element>") to make clear that one is talking about chemical elements. This doesn't help with distinguishing 硒 (selenium) and 锡 (tin) though, which are both xī (and then there's 矽, silicon). (Credit for identifying this homophone pair/triple goes to François Demay.) One can certainly say something like <number>号元素 ("element #<number>"), but spelling the Roman-letter symbols is an easier method.

Finally, after all the criticism of Chinese characters, we should keep in mind that the language of chemistry, like that of mathematics, relies heavily on symbols and other notation. Sometimes it's okay for something to not be serializable/parsable; it would be sad if such formalisms had to be limited by the requirement for everything in them being reducable to phoneme strings in a straightforward way. Human language is limited after all, and there's a reason these disciplines use special terms, abbreviations, symbols, and diagrams."

Source

More generally speaking, context and classifiers help in Chinese.

(Note: not an expert myself)
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Re: Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

Postby Purangi » Wed Sep 29, 2021 7:58 pm

This video provides a good example of <钚> being used in normal speech (starts at 1:08). Note the way the host puts special emphasis when pronouncing it. With context, there is really no ambiguity. You might not know what <钚> is, but it is clear that it cannot be understood as 不.
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Re: Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

Postby Anthony Appleyard » Wed Sep 29, 2021 9:04 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I'm not a Chinese speaker but I imagine it should be very clear from context. You're not going to be talking about the weather and then all of the sudden plutonium comes up, it'll be in a conversation about chemistry or nuclear power or atomic bombs or something like that....


I have heard something like that sort of jump in topic, in television news here in England. The news had several ordinary items; then the next news item said that police and officials were looking for some plutonium that had gone astray. Presumably in Chinese the word 钚 would be accompanied by other words to disambiguate and say what meaning of is intended.
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Re: Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

Postby Axon » Thu Sep 30, 2021 2:55 am

Purangi wrote:This video provides a good example of <钚> being used in normal speech (starts at 1:08). Note the way the host puts special emphasis when pronouncing it. With context, there is really no ambiguity. You might not know what <钚> is, but it is clear that it cannot be understood as 不.


The phrase 当年长崎的原子弹就是钚制作的 gives a great example of why native speakers certainly wouldn't think of 不 here. 不 changes in tone before a fourth tone word, while 钚 retains its tone. Also, the phrase "___是___制作的" (___ is made of ___) requires nouns in both the blank spaces, so your brain gets primed to interpret the words in those positions as nouns. This is how a lot of surface-level ambiguity gets resolved in many languages: although many words may be homophonous, they might not be the same parts of speech, one might be countable and the other a mass noun, they might conjugate differently, and so on.

Funnily enough, as I hadn't known the word for plutonium before, the noun that came to mind was 布, meaning "cloth" and also pronounced bù. Someone hearing that sentence above could reasonably understand it as "The atomic bomb used back in Nagasaki was made of cloth." But then that wouldn't make any logical sense, and native speakers would decode it from context as other posts have mentioned. If the context was missing and they didn't know anything about atomic bombs or the word for plutonium, they'd ask somebody for an explanation or just stay confused for a while until it clicked, much like I get confused when I mishear song lyrics that make no sense in English.
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Re: Chinese :: a query about the chemical elements

Postby Anthony Appleyard » Thu Sep 30, 2021 9:56 am

Axon wrote:... much like I get confused when I mishear song lyrics that make no sense in English.

(For lyrics distorted by mishearing, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_nomenclature_in_Chinese lists many new Chinese characters involved in organic cmemistry.

It also describes these new invented characters :

熵 (shāng: entropy), from 火 (huǒ: fire) and 商 (shāng: quotient)
焓 (hán, enthalpy), from 火 (huǒ: fire) and 含 (hán: to contain)

It also says "This list is not exhaustive, although many of the other characters used for this purpose can only be found in specialist dictionaries.". Can a complete list of these new characters be found online anywhere?
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Anthony Appleyard
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A useful big book about the history of Chinese characters

Postby Anthony Appleyard » Sat Oct 09, 2021 3:32 pm

I have a useful big book (not for sale) about the history of Chinese characters. It is

CHINESE CHARACTERS

Their origin, etymology, history, classiification and signification.
A thorough study from Chinese documents.
By. Dr.L.Wieger,S.J.

820 pages.
A copy could likely be bought from a good bookseller.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It contains:
177 etymological lessons
An index of the characters described in these lessons
Old forms of characters as moulded into old bronze vases
List of 858 characters used as the phonetic parts of radical-and-phonetic compound characters
Long list of radical-and-phonetic compound characters sorted by which phonetic part they use
List of characters, of which one is pronounced as each of the possible Chinese syllables spelled by the Wade spelling system
Long list of characters, sorted by pronunciation as spelled by the Wade spelling system
List of the 214 K'ang-hsi character sorting keys or radicals
Long list of characters, sorted by their K'ang-hsi character sorting keys or radicals
A list of characters whose radical is not obvious

Edition published in 1927 and again in 1965
Standard Book Number 486-21321-8
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-18441
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