Re: [lojban] Nomenclature of the periodic table

And, of course, they have the day numbers wrong anyhow (to revive an old argument that has been dormant too long).

On Thursday, June 2, 2016 9:57 AM, Bruno Panasiewicz <ciuak.prog@gmail.com> wrote:

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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