After Zhu Yuanzhang ascended the throne, he selected the first character of his name for his descendants, and required that the second character be based on the principle of "five elements cycle", using fire, earth, metal, water and wood as the radicals. . As a result, in order to avoid the taboo of ancestral names or having the same names as their peers, many uncommon words did appear in the names of the Zhu Ming royal family, including chromium, cobalt, polonium, etc. that were later used as element names.
As for the fact that Xu Shou (1818-1884) was inspired by the names of the kings of the Ming Dynasty when he translated the "Periodic Table of Elements", it is a descendant's opinion. The reason is very simple:
(1) There is no reliable historical data that Xu Shou referred to the naming of the Zhu Ming royal family.
(2) It is true that chromium, cobalt, polonium, etc. are rare words, but they are all included in the "Kangxi Dictionary". Xu Shou does not need to "re-search" in the so-called "Zhu Yuanzhang Family Tree" or "Ming History: King List" Discover".
Before Xu Shou, American missionaries such as Ding Haoliang and Margao Gao had translated some element names into Chinese, but the quality was poor (for example, Ding Haoliang translated potassium as "grey essence" and arsenic as " "Letter Stone" etc.).
In the Jiangnan Manufacturing General Translation Center, Xu Shou adopted the method of "interpretation and writing". First, the British missionary Frye translated the Western chemistry books into Chinese sentence by sentence. After recording it himself, he then corrected and polished it, making it It is in line with Chinese language habits. It was when they were collaborating to translate "Chemical Identification" (published in 1872) that they encountered the problem of translating the names of chemical elements.
Xu Shou and Frya set up three standards for the translation of chemical elements:
First, "the name of the original substance is still used in ancient China, such as gold, silver and copper. Iron, lead, tin, mercury, sulfur, phosphorus, carbon are also", that is, the original element names in Chinese characters, such as gold, silver, copper, iron, etc., are used directly.
Second, "The appropriate ones translated by the ancients are still the same, such as oxygen, light air, and light air." That is, the element names translated by the predecessors, such as nourishing air, light air, etc., are more appropriate. Yes, continue to use it.
Third, there are dozens of other "unprecedented in ancient times". "Today, we take the first sound of the Roman text and translate it into a Chinese character. The first sound does not match, but the second sound is used, and the radical is added. It means that the names of elements other than those that conform to the first and second principles should be chosen according to the first or second pronunciation of their English pronunciation, and the Chinese characters with the same pronunciation should be used to represent gold, stone, etc. The radical of a trait. ②
The third point here later became the basic principle of Chinese translation of chemical elements.
Xu Shou and Frya *** translated 64 elements (49 metals, 15 non-metals), about half of which were jointly translated by American church doctors John Chia and He Mingran in "Elementary Chemistry" The names of the elements are consistent; the other half, such as calcium, sodium, cobalt, potassium, etc., are used as element names for the first time. Of the 64 translated names of elements recorded in "Chemical Appraisal", 47 are still in use today.