It’s not normally that the worlds of lexicography and technologies collide, but in a movie by the etymologist [RobWords] we may well have located a rare instance. In a intriguing 16-moment online video he takes us by way of the origins of the names you will uncover in the periodic desk. Here’s a word movie you do not have to be on the team of a dictionary to recognize!
Etymology is a intriguing analyze, in which the scholar will have to disentangle people etymologies and mistaken homophones to obtain the genuine root of a term. The good thing is in the case of most things they bear a title bestowed on them by the experts who found out them, so their etymologies are not often in dispute.
The etymologies split neatly into types, with amid them these distinctions as Latin or Greek descriptions, destinations like the Swedish village of Ytterby which has extra factors named just after it than anywhere else, aspects named for mythological figures, and individuals named for people.
He artfully skates above the distinction involving aluminium and a curiously comparable metallic the People in america simply call aluminum, due to the fact etymologists are utilised to deflecting controversy when language dissimilarities color, or even coloration, people’s feelings. Thank you, Noah Webster!
It is an entertaining diversion for anyone with a enjoy of both of those science and of language, and should remind us that the examine of language has just as substantially scientific rigour in its study as any of those people components.
Cupcake periodic desk: Science Record Institute, CC BY-SA 3..
