Hydrogen, lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, cesium and francium, beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium and radium? Any science student will be familiar with these sentences, and even know them by heart. In 1869, the Russian scientist Mendeleev He invented the periodic table of elements and promoted the development and progress of chemical history.
When the periodic table of elements was introduced to China, naturally each element had a Chinese name. If you also like history or understand the history of the Ming Dynasty, you will find that the names of these elements are similar to the names of the royal children of the Ming Dynasty! Could it be that the periodic table of elements was invented by our country as early as the Ming Dynasty?
Characteristics of naming elements in the periodic table
We know that in the periodic table, elements can be simply divided into several categories. Metal elements are common ones in our lives like iron. , silver, copper, etc. are all metals. Where there are metallic elements, there are naturally non-metallic elements. For example, hydrogen, which ranks first, and silicon used in chips are all non-metallic elements. Then we can find that Chinese characters usually have With such a rule, even if you don't know what the Chinese character means, you can roughly infer it from the literal meaning.
Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements are what we call hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in our daily life. They are all gases, so the radicals of the radicals all have the prefix "qi"; while metals such as gold, silver, copper and iron are It is next to the word gold; non-metals such as carbon, silicon, sulfur and other non-metals are almost always next to the word stone. I have to say that Chinese writing culture is extensive and profound!
In the periodic table of elements, there are by no means the only common elements I mentioned before. There are also some Chinese characters that we cannot see in our daily lives, such as rubidium, cesium, francium, and strontium. , barium, radium and other words. It can be said that these words can only be seen if you are exposed to chemistry. So where did these words come from? We have to start with the naming of a founding emperor.
The naming of Zhu Yuanzhang
The founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, was not originally named Zhu Yuanzhang, but Zhu Chongba. Because in the Yuan Dynasty, Han people with low status were not allowed to have their own names. They could only be named after their family ranking or their age on their birthday. In other words, the Han people's names at that time were just a string of numbers, like Zhu Yuanzhang's father Zhu Wu. The fourth eldest brother is Zhu Chongsi, and Chang Yuchun's father is Chang Chongwu. The name Zhu Yuanzhang was the name he gave himself, which means to kill Yuanzhang. Zhang is a kind of sharp jade.
Usually people will always find ways to compensate their children for things they could not get before, and Zhu Yuanzhang is no exception. Zhu Yuanzhang can be said to be the lowest status among the founding emperors of the past. He suffered many hardships since childhood and could not even have a decent name. As a father, he naturally did not want his children and grandchildren to suffer such hardships, even if they were already children of the royal family. Zhu Yuanzhang was very worried about the names of his descendants.
He stipulated that the name of any descendant of the Zhu family must have three characters. The second character is the seniority. One look at the second character can tell which generation of the prince he belongs to. For this reason, he specially wrote a family tree for each son. For example, the prince's family is as follows:
Yun Wen followed the instructions of his ancestors.
After saying the second character, look at the last character in the name.
Zhu Yuanzhang required that the last word must be chosen according to the five elements, that is, from father to son: wood, fire, earth, gold, and water. The five elements cycle of water, wood, and descendants is also the endless shortage.
Zhu Yuanzhang’s original intention was quite good, but he never thought that he had twenty-six sons alone. Excluding the sons who died in infancy or died of various reasons, there were also 23. , each son will give birth to more than ten sons, and the third generation will be more than two hundred. However, Chinese characters contain only so many metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, and they have to be avoided after using them. In this way, it becomes difficult to choose a name.
What to do? In ancient times, Cangjie coined the characters, and today, the Zhu family's descendants synthesized the characters. As a result, the names of the children of the Ming Dynasty royal family became more and more biased, and palladium, cobalt, chromium, and niobium appeared.
Xu Shou translated the periodic table of elements
When the periodic table of elements invented by Russian scientist Mendeleev was introduced to China, Xu Shou, a chemist of the Qing Dynasty, was fascinated by the magic of the periodic table of elements. Chu admired it very much and wanted to translate it into Chinese so that it could be spread in China.
But naming elements is by no means a simple matter. It is not like we used to name our children and just call them Zhang San Li Si. Instead, we have to name them according to the characteristics of each element. When Xu Shou was looking through the information, he accidentally came across the family tree of Zhu Yuanzhang of the Ming Dynasty. The characters in it were mostly rare, and most of them were related to metal minerals. This was in line with the characteristics of the elements in the periodic table, so the names of Zhu Yuanzhang's descendants were Incorporated into the periodic table of elements.
Zhu Yuanzhang would never have thought that the names he racked his brains to think of for his descendants would enter the periodic table of elements a hundred years later and become widely circulated. In this way, the Zhu family occupied the top spot of the periodic table of elements. Half of the country until now. So it is not that the periodic table of elements was invented as early as the Ming Dynasty, but the Chinese characters in it were created in the Ming Dynasty.