Re: [lojban] Nomenclature of the periodic table

[Bruno Panasiewicz <ciuak.prog@gmail.com>]

On 2 June 2016 at 16:31, la pluja <hr.muendler@gmail.com> wrote:

Something that has bugged me the last few days is the current nomenclature of the chemical elements.
I am relatively new to lojban but what I have learned quite early is that lojban tries to name every object/idea/concept systematically.
So for an example the lojban names for days in a week are named after there position in the week.
Monday (or "is a monday") for example is pavdei (a construct of the rafsi of pa and djedi), literally "one-day".

On the other hand the current nomenclature of chemical elements (https://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/dikni_selratni_cartu) is based on their trivia names in latin/english or whatsoever.

Why is this? It's like calling monday mondei in lojba.

Well, there are problems with Ndei either. pavdei could as well mean "one-day-long", but this is *not* the official meaning.

The way to solve this is to use a type-3 fu'ivla, like deirpa, deinre... sadly no-one uses them, and we're using horrible words.

Note that there are 2 ways (well, 3, if you count the Ndei approach) numbers are used in lujvo:

#1: as a literal quotation of the number: pavypa'a [< pa pacna = 1 hope] = pacna be fi li pa (pacna3 is the probability with which an event will occur – so here, "hope w/ probability 1");

#2: as the number of things that satisfy a given place: rolcti [< ro citka = all eat] = [ka'e] citka be ro da (= "omnivore"; here ro (all) occurs as the number of things x1 eats (here: number of things x1 *can* eat)).

 

I propose the chemical elements are called by the number of protons in their nuclei, which defines the chemical element (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element).

An possible implementation would be to combine the rafsi of the numbers with the rafsi of ratni.

An example:
 pavrat

One thing to tell you: brivla always end with vowels, so you'll have to stick to pavratni instead (pavrat is a cmevla).

 

x1 is an atom of atomic number 1 of isotope number/atomic weight x2; x1 is hydrogen of isotope number/atomic weight x2

As per usage #1 of numbers in lujvo, this is correct.

I'll try doing something of an automatic insertion of such lujvo into the JVS database.

 

and/or

x1 is a quantity of/contains/is made of hydrogen

Now, that's a different story – you can't do things like that. pavratmai [< pa ratni marji = 1 atom made-of] would be OK. (The place structure would be a bit more complex: "x1 is made of H of isotope x2, in form x3").

 

The latter definition could of course also be made with gunma or something similar.

Not really gunma.

-- mu'o

 

Any thoughts on that?

(Another proposal which might be discussed is if protons, neutrons and such should be called something equivalent to "up-up-down" [proton]
instead of protoni or nurtoni respectively. Then it would be necessary to define unambigious valsi for quantum states)

That's an overkill, I think, but I'm not sure.

 

I am neither a physician nor an experienced lojbanist but this simply bugged me several days, so what do you think of it?

^ 

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