• Wilco@lemm.eeEnglish
    162·
    3 hours ago

    We say it the original correct way in the US. Other countries changed it for some reason. The guy that discovered it in 1808, Sir Humphrey Davy named it “Alumium” which based on Alumen (Latin for bitter salt)but quickly changed it to “Aluminum”. I swear I remember reading that he kept getting shit on by the science community and his friends for naming a metal “bitter salt” in Latin … but can’t find a reference.

    His colleagues in Britain did mess with him and start using the name “Aluminium” … exactly because it ended in “ium” like ALL the other elements (Oxygenium, Carbonium, Ironium, Zincium, Nitrogenium, and the like). They US just kept the name the discoverer wanted instead of giving into those British asshats that just wanted to troll Sir Davy.

    He also isolated Magnesium and named it “magnium”, but later changed to magnesium. The guy just couldnt settle on names. Again, in my version of reality it is because his friends kept giving him shit.

    • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
      1·
      45 minutes ago

      They US just kept the name the discoverer wanted instead of giving into those British asshats that just wanted to troll Sir Davy.

      It probably wasnt really a willful defiance thing. It’s likely more correct to say that we kept the name because by the time they changed it officially in Europe, we had millions of students across the country that had textbooks with the name Aluminum in it, that had already been taught the original name, and if the inconsistentcy was even important enought to consider “correcting”, it was likely deemed too costly and too much of a headache to change at the time. By the time people were buying reprints/new editions/more recently written textbooks anyway, professional chemists in the US had been calling it Aluminum for years. Given how isolated we were from Europe in the early 1800s, there was very little pressure to align with them on it, and so it stayed. The longer it stayed the more likely it was to be permanent, and here we are.

      But yeah, Sir Humphrey Davy was an indecisive wishy-washy namer of elements, disseminated multiple names across the world, but somehow that is our fault when we just stuck with the one we were given and everyone else changed over nitpicky conventions. It’s not the only thing that Brits shit on about American English that is entirely their invention or their mistake:

      • “Soccer” being a British term short for “Association Football”

      • The season “Fall” being a British term shortened from the phrase “The Fall of the Leaf” and directly complementary to “Spring” which comes from the phrase “The Spring of the Leaf”, which they still use despite making fun of Americans for “Fall” instead of their “Autumn”, which Americans also use.

      • “Dove” instead of “dived”, “pled” instead of “pleaded”, “have gotten” instead of “have got”, etc. all started in Britain but were dropped there and stayed in the US.

      • “Herb” being pronounced with an audible “h”. The word is borrowed from French, where the h is silent, exactly like , “honorary”, and “honesty”. Neither country pronounces either of those words with an “h” sound, but that doesnt stop people like Eddie Izzard shitting on how Americans say it with a silent “h” despite the American pronunciation being, arguably, more correct given the word’s origins.

      Side note, it is crazy how many words in English are borrowed from French, even if they are horribly mangled and unrecognizable now in a lot of cases. The British Aristocracy really had their noses shoved firmly up French asses for a lot of their history in the last few centuries.

    • Doom@ttrpg.network
      31·
      2 hours ago

      Just like soccer.

      Look the language is ours now england, you lost the right.

      • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
        41·
        3 hours ago

        Alumina ore was smelted/refined to isolate the pure metal.

        Using the preexisting naming convention that ore->metal goes a->um, the discoverer of the element named it Aluminum.

        Later, British chemists got mad that their US naming standard was different from their own standard.

        • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          no.

          the discoverer, humphry davy, was english. the name is originally the english “alum” and the latin “ium”, which was criticized because names were traditionally constructed from latin roots. european scientists suggested “aluminium”, for “element created from alum”, but the year after that, when davy published a chemistry book, he spelled it “aluminum”. this took hold in britain, but the rest of europe used “aluminium” so they standardized.

          a few years later, when the word first appeared in an american dictionary, only the “num” spelling was added. scientists kept using “-ium” but the general populace went on the dictionary definition until it won out. the “american” spelling was only accepted by american scientists about 110 years after the element was discovered.

  • saltnotsugar@lemmy.world
    9·
    7 hours ago

    Al is Arabic for “the,” “um” was because the scientist forgot what he wanted to say, “in” means inside, and “um” also means the scientist forgot what to say and likely ran away.