From akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu Mon Sep 4 02:40:39 2000 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id CAA127184 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 02:40:38 -0700 Received: from mailspool.helios.nd.edu (mailspool.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.7]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id CAA04888 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 02:40:37 -0700 Received: from darwin.helios.nd.edu (darwin.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.114]) by mailspool.helios.nd.edu (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id EAA25587 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 04:40:36 -0500 (EST) Received: (from akriman@localhost) by darwin.helios.nd.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1/ND-cluster) id e849eaI02659 for classics@u.washington.edu; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 04:40:36 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 04:40:36 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred M Kriman Message-Id: <200009040940.e849eaI02659@darwin.helios.nd.edu> To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: alumin[i]um The following entry appears [[0]] in the indifferently accurate Stammtisch Beau Fleuve glossary. | aluminium | British name for aluminum (Al). The story of how this name jumped | around is a bit involved, as you can imagine from the fact that we don't | even tell it here. Aluminum is one of those elements whose names were | derived from the minerals they were isolated from (alumina, in this | instance). Let it at least be noted that Al is not alone among metals in | having a name ending in -um but not -ium: Molybdenum, Tantalum and | Platinum, as well as Aurum, Argentum, and others, if one will consider | the names on which the chemical abbreviations are based. It went | through a number of names, one of which was aluminum, proposed by | Sir Humphrey Davies. At one point, however, aluminium was the | accepted spelling and usage among chemists in the US as well as Britain. | Still, in 1925 the American Chemical Society (ACS) voted to use | Aluminum. | The issue of aluminum vs. aluminium even gets an entry in the aue FAQ, | but no real answer. My guess is that as long as aluminum was difficult to | reduce (i.e., before the Hall process), it was a chemists' curiosity, and | long years of chemical practice (using -ium) were probably of no | significance compared to isolated highly public news involving aluminum. | I have in mind the completion of the Washington monument, which was | capped in 1884 with a pyramid of cast ``aluminum.'' The -num word | was standard usage among miners and in other practical trades, just as | the old name ``columbium'' is preferred by metallurgists to the chemists' | ``niobium'' (vide Cb). (Five hyperlinks in the original entry were flattened to plain text above; the a.u.e. faq [[1]] has some classical content, and a different version of the Davy story than appeared on list.) The tangled usage situation of _aluminum_ recalls those of _billion_ and _trapezoid_ [[2,3]]. It may be that _aluminium_ in some way qualifies as ``the international standard,'' as has been suggested. However, my own impression from compound-semiconductor conferences in Japan and Europe as well as North America is that the Commonwealth usage -ium is exceptional, and that even Romance-speakers use ``aluminum'' when _speaking_ English. I suspect that this has something to do with accent: even when British spelling is followed, American pronunciations are influential (Canadian spelling and pronunciation being perhaps the clearest demonstration). Most differences in spelling (like -re/-er -our/-or, -ise/-ize, y/i, ae/e, unlike -t/-ed) do not entail a difference in pronunciation. [If -ium were a stressed syllable pronounced /ju:m/, then -um (/u:m/) might be allophonic, like _new_ (/nju:/ and /nu:/). I tend to see the American pronunciation as following from the American stress pattern.] Also, in trying to understand the inflections in chemical terminology, one should bear in mind that chemists have created various dovetailed systems of nomenclature; the logic of those systems trumps etymological considerations (and stubbornly established practice trumps IUPAC logic). For example, all the halogens have names ending in -ine: fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, astatine. Their (singly-charged) ions have names ending in -ide: fluoride, chloride, .... Similarly, there was an attempt to give all the noble gases names ending in -on, and this almost succeeded (radon, xenon, krypton, argon, neon, helium). The mistaken naming of helium occurred because it was identified (from absorption lines in the solar spectrum) before it was isolated as a gas [[4]]. [[0]] http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/A06.html#aluminium [[1]] http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/FAQaue/index.html#%22alumin%28i%29um%22 [[2]] http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/B03.html#billion [[3]] http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/T05.html#trapezoid [[4]] http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/H01.html#He .