(I did not make the map, the typo is not my doing.)

    • Dicska@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      32 minutes ago

      Why call it silver when it’s Ag anyway?

      (we call it nátrium, but there’s more to it than the periodic table name)

  • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 hours ago

    If any one is curious about japanese, it’s basically natrium ナトリウム (and potassium is kalium カリウム)

    • lunarul@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      15 hours ago

      But nobody actually calls it “natriu”, it’s just a thing you hear once in school to help you remember why the symbol is Na and then never use it again.

  • infeeeee@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    95
    ·
    21 hours ago

    I found a reddit post why sodium and potassium have 2 names:

    There was some argument over what to call the elements. They were discovered by Sir Humphrey Davy who called them “sodium” from the Latin “sodanum” for a compound of sodium used as a treatment for headaches, and “potassium” from English “potash” which was the method used to extract potassium salts.

    But a German chemist, Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert, proposed “natronium” from Neo-Latin as a reference to “natron” which is what the Egyptians called sodium carbonate, and “kalium” from the Neo-Latin of the Arabic “al qalyah” which means “ashes”.

    So in English they were “sodium” and “potassium”, but in German they were “Natronium” (now simply “Natrium”) and “Kalium”.

    It just so happened that the guy who invented the modern chemical symbols was Jöns Jacob Berzelius. He was Swiss and spoke German, so he derived the symbols from the German names.

    • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      edit-2
      13 hours ago

      Is that why potassium is K on the periodic table?

      And now that I think about it, sodium is Na…

      Damnit, our educational system has been telling us we are wrong the whole time! Sneaky bullshit!

    • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      39
      ·
      21 hours ago

      That’s almost as much fun as Davy pointlessly waffling between alumium, aluminum, and aluminium till we once again ended up with people who speak the same language using different terms.

        • Akasazh@feddit.nl
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          3 hours ago

          And pot=pot, so potassium is ‘from the ashpot’ which was how kalium salts were extracted, by adding water to wood ash, then filtering and evaporating the water off.

    • Successful_Try543@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      edit-2
      5 hours ago

      Fun fact: Tungsten ist W/Volfram in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish where its English name, tung sten meaning “heavy stone”, originates from.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        5 hours ago

        Just to clarify, Swedish for “heavy stone” is literally “tung sten”.

        I don’t know if it came around for non Scandinavians.

  • Manzas@lemdro.id
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Well The Lithuanian one is wrong the person who made this couldn’t even copy from google translate. it is natris

    • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      59 minutes ago

      Funny thing is hungarian also does the same. Á is the long form of a(tho the sound of it does change for some absurd reason i dont know). Tho finnish doesnt do it which is sad because then all the finno-ugric languages in europe would say it naatrium.

  • riplin@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    21 hours ago

    Funny how they write “name of sodium (Na)”. I mean the abbreviation is right there…