Friday, April 18, 2014

Elements

I'm trying to decide how to handle the elements of the periodic table. Should they have a characteristic ending? It would be systematic to do it that way, but there are elements, like gold, that would be sort of distorted that way.  How about selecting a word that means "element," like "jen" (from the English ending in oxygen, etc., and then making compounds? As things stand, kin, from Japanese, means "gold". So maybe kinjen would mean "gold as an element." But many elements, if they're derived from other Ceqli words would have to be compounds. I want to preserve as far as possible the similarity of the symbols to the words, so I figure "helium" would be helijen, rather than sunjen, and as yet heli has no meaning in Ceqli. And I think that's okay.  And in Ceqli, "California" is kalifornet (names have to end in -t) but it would drop the -t to make the element. And since it's not really all that useful to have the element name resemble the place name, I'm inclined to want to make it resemble its symbol, Cf, instead, and call it californjen

So unless I'm talked out of it, I'm going to go with making the element names first of all suggest the symbols, unless the symbols don't begin with a cwazim, and in those cases I'll either put an h- in front, as in heynsteynjen, or just use a form, like kinjen, borrowed directly from one language or another. I was going to follow the pattern of German, and call hydrogen panijen,  but I think it's more important to follow the symbol, so it will be hidrojen.

Suggestions welcome.

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