Chemical elements in East Asian languages

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.

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:

1. 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. There are only four radicals 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 "air, steam") for gases.
2. The phonetic (sound) part represents the character's pronunciation and is a partial transliteration of the element. For each element character, this is a unique phonetic component. Since 118 elements have been discovered, there are over 100 different phonetic components used in naming the elements. Because many characters in modern Chinese are homophones, even when tone is taken into account, it is possible to select two different phonetic components that nevertheless gives the same pronunciation. 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, tin (锡) and selenium (硒) have names that are pronounced the same way, including tone (xī).[2] This sometimes poses difficulties in verbal communication, as Sn and Se can both be divalent and tetravalent. Thus, SnO₂ and SeO₂ are both pronounced èryǎnghuàxī 二氧化锡(硒) and are indistinguishable verbally. To avoid further confusion, P.R.C. authorities avoided using the name 矽 xī (or any tonal variants) for silicon.

† 內/内 is primarily pronounced as nèi, but has 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 悌.

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

The "water" radical (水) is rarely used, since only two elements (bromine and mercury) are truly liquid at standard room temperature and pressure. Both of 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.

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:

Simple covalent binary inorganic compounds E_mX_n are named as

'n (as a Chinese numeral) X' 化 (huà)[3] 'm (as a Chinese numeral) E',

where X is more electronegative than E, using the IUPAC formal electronegativity order. 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'). There is also a Chinese analog of the -ic/-ous nomenclature for higher/lower oxidation states. The lower oxidation state is marked with the character 亚 (yà, 'minor; secondary'). For example FeCl₂ and FeCl₃ are 氯化亚铁 and 氯化铁, respectively. In a four-way contrast, hypo- and per- are marked with 次 (cì, 'inferior; following') and 高 (gāo, 'high, upper'), respectively. For example, the acids HClO_n (n = 1, 2, 3, 4) are called 次氯酸 (n = 1), 亚氯酸 (n = 2), 氯酸 (n = 3), and 高氯酸 (n = 4). 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).

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.[1] The National Academy for Educational Research under the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China on Taiwan published an identical list in April 2017.[4] 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.[5]

The Chinese characters for these symbols are:

Nihonium: Traditional: U+9268 鉨 (HTML 鉨) Simplfied: U+9FED 鿭 (HTML 鿭) (nǐ)

Moscovium: Traditional: U+93CC 鏌 (HTML 鏌) Simplfied: U+9546 镆 (HTML 镆) (mò)

Tennessine: Both Traditional and Simplfied: U+9FEC 鿬 (HTML 鿬) (tián)

Oganesson: Both Traditional and Simplfied: U+9FEB 鿫 (HTML 鿫) (ào)

A minority of the "new characters" are not completely new inventions, as they coincide with archaic characters, whose original meanings have long been lost to most people. For example, 鏷 (protactinium), 鈹 (beryllium), 鉻 (chromium), and 鑭 (lanthanum) are obscure characters meaning "raw iron", "needle", "hook", and "harrow" respectively.

The majority of the elements' names are the same in Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, merely being variants of each other, since most of the names were translated by a single body of standardization before the PRC-ROC split. However, since francium and the transuranium elements were discovered during or after the split, they have different names in Taiwan and in Mainland China. In Hong Kong, both Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese names are used.[6]

The isotopes of hydrogen – protium (¹H), deuterium (D) and tritium (T) – are written 氕 piē, 氘 dāo and 氚 chuān, respectively, in both simplified and traditional writing. 鑀 is used in Taiwan for both einsteinium (mainland China: 锿) and ionium, a previous name for the isotope thorium-230.

Even though the Japanese language also uses Chinese characters (kanji), it primarily employs katakana to transliterate names of the elements from European languages (often German/Dutch or Latin [via German] or English). For example,

On the other hand, elements known since antiquity are Chinese loanwords, which are mostly identical to their Chinese counterparts, albeit in the Shinjitai, for example, iron (鉄) is tetsu (Tang-dynasty loan) and lead (鉛) is namari (native reading). While all elements in Chinese are single-character in the official system, some Japanese elements have two characters. Often this parallels colloquial or everyday names for such elements in Chinese, such as 水銀/水银 (pinyin: shuǐyín) for mercury and 硫黃/硫黄 (pinyin: liúhuáng) for sulfur. A special case is tin (錫, suzu), which is more often written in katakana (スズ).

Some names were later invented to describe properties or characteristics of the element. They were mostly introduced around the 18th century to Japan, and they sometimes differ drastically from their Chinese counterparts. The following comparison shows that Japanese does not use the radical system for naming elements like Chinese.

• Interactive table in Traditional Chinese
• Interactive table in Simplified Chinese
• Interactive table in Japanese
• Interactive table in Korean
• English-Chinese periodic table of elements

• The Chinese Periodic Table: A Rosetta Stone for Understanding the Language of Chemistry in the Context of the Introduction of Modern Chemistry into China
• A New Inquiry into the Translation of Chemical Terms by John Fryer and Xu Shou
• Chinese Terms for Chemical Elements