Four Newly Discovered Elements Receive Names (theverge.com)

Press2ToContinue quotes a report from The Verge: The proposed names for recently discovered superheavy elements are: Nihonium and symbol Nh, for the element 113; Moscovium and symbol Mc, for the element 115; Tennessine and symbol Ts, for the element 117; Oganesson and symbol Og, for the element 118. This isn't finalized. Not sure I even like some of these, and maybe you feel the same way. Above are the proposed names that will substitute for the current placeholders (e.g., ununpentium, ununseptium). Nilhonium, Moscovium, and Tennesine are all named for places; Oganessen is named for the Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian. But we have until November to lobby for other names. Here's a chance to go down in history and name an element on the periodic table. How about naming one Elementy McElementface?

Comments

I can't be the only one wondering...

[RevRagnarok]

This article is tagged Japan because "Nihonium takes its name from the Japanese name for Japan and was the first new element discovered there, at the RIKEN lab." ( http://www.popsci.com/four-new... )

Periodic Videos

[Bender Unit 22]

Allow me to push one of my favorite YouTube channels to you. :)

New Elements Named - Periodic Table of Videos :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Americans will spell it Moscovum

[Rei]

I'm sorry, but "aluminium" is outright wrong.

Humphry Davy, the man who isolated it, never called it that. He called it "aluminum" and "alumium". Never aluminium. The latter was suggested by an anonymous critic who said that he didn't like the sound of aluminum, that it didn't sound "classical" enough to him. Never mind that the classical elements were overwhelmingly -um, not -ium: ferrum, plumbum, argentum, stannum, cuprum, aurum, hydrargyrum, etc. The first element ending in -um added to the known elements since ancient times was platinum, also not a -ium. Also discovered before aluminum were molybdenum and tantalum.

The reason that many elements started getting endings of -ium rather than just -um wasn't because "-ium was more classical" - it's because they were often named after the things they were isolated from which often had i near the end, making it a convenient joining stem - magnesium from magnesia, zirconium from zirconia, yttrium from yttria, and on and on. Some did it indirectly as well, such as beryllium, which was originally glucium (from glucina), but had the gluc- replaced with beryl to distinguish it from other sweet-compound-forming elements. If you want to use -i as the joining stem on aluminum, it should be called alumium - which is one of the names Davy suggested. It comes from alumina, not "aluminia".

Call it alumium if you want (that would be a perfectly reasonable name), but your added, ahistorical syllable addition in "aluminium" will continue to grate on my ears. There's no such thing as "aluminia"

Re:Elerium-115

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, they all do. All the way to the edge of the universe.

Re:god no

[Sique]

This is simply wrong. Many apparently greek words aren't of greek origin, but also the greek took over words from other languages. Case in point: the peach. The word comes from the old french word pesche (modern french: pêche), which comes from middle latin pesca, which in turn comes from classical latin persica, which originally was malus persicum, which derives from greek mêlon persikón, which in turn comes from the old persian word Parsuwash, which in turn was an Old Persian speaking tribe in the Iranian Highlands.

Just because your own knowledge of a word ends with the greek origin doesn't mean that the word itself didn't enter the greek language itself as a foreign word.