[CLPadvocate]

> Yet many people persist in calling aluminum foil "tinfoil."

> We chemists get annoyed at things like that.

> Now, about aluminum foil.

Actually, most chemists are profoundly annoyed at the Americans' inability to spell aluminium properly...

[monocasa]

Humphrey Davy, the British chemist who performed early work to isolate the element, and who initially named it, called it 'aluminum'. Americans mostly followed him, but the British changed later at the complaints of the French, Swedish, and Germans that it used essentially English roots rather than Latin ones. Which, considering that we now have elements named such things as Tennessine, seems to be a bit of an argument that doesn't quite apply anymore.

[adrian_b]

The suffix "-io-", which becomes "-ium" in accusative/nominative neuter Latin nouns, is extremely ancient. It is inherited from the common Indo-European language.

This suffix is used to derive nouns or adjectives from other nouns, where the derived nouns are understood to have some kind of relationship with the base nouns.

A great number of the names of chemical elements use the Latin variant of this suffix, i.e. "-ium", to derive the name of the element either from the name of the substance from which it has been extracted, or from the name of some characteristic property of the element or from some mythological name or from some person or place that is intended to be honored by this choice.

The name of aluminium comes from the name of the aluminium sulfate in Latin, which was "alumin-".

So "aluminium" means "something that is not aluminium sulfate, but it is related to aluminium sulfate".

On the other hand, "aluminum", which lacks the derivation suffix, just means "aluminium sulfate" (which has become "alum" in English), but the noun has been converted from the 3rd Latin declension to the 2nd Latin declension. Such conversion between declensions were not unusual even for native Latin speakers.

So this is definitely a grammar mistake, which is annoying for those who understand the meaning of words, because it creates an exception that must be remembered, instead of applying the general rule.

In general the British and American scientists have always been much more lax in observing grammar rules than the continental Europeans. So there are also other chemical elements where the English names differ from the correct names. For instance the name of the chemical element "silicium" is derived from Latin "silic-" (flint), from which it is extracted, but in English it has been changed to "silicon", for the silly reason to make it rhyme with "carbon", despite the fact that most chemical properties of silicon resemble more those of boron or of phosphorus or of germanium, than those of carbon (because valence is only 1 of the 3 main properties that determine chemical behavior, electronegativity and ionic/atomic size are equally important). (Carbon is one of the few elements that were known in pure form already in the Ancient World, so its name is not derived from another noun.) ("Boron" has also been changed in English to make it rhyme with "carbon", which is equally baseless.)

[monocasa]

Except Davy said he named it after platinum, except with an alum- prefix instead of the silver plat- prefix, as it was to be considered a new precious metal out of what had previously just been considered impurities like platinum relatively contemporaneously had.

[dpe82]

Sir Humphry Davy first isolated the stuff and he called it aluminum, so that's good enough for me.

[st_goliath]

Well, the name Davy originally proposed was alumium.

I propose we switch to that instead, so everyone can be annoyed equally and in the same way.

[dpe82]

I accept your proposal; alumium it is.

[elric]

> Actually, most chemists are profoundly annoyed at the Americans' inability to spell aluminium properly...

That's just patently false. Anyone who's had any sort of education in chemistry/physics is aware of the history of the word and doesn't give a damn.

[thomassmith65]

It isn't clear if that is a dig at Americans having their own spelling of aluminum/aluminium, or ignorance that Americans have their own spelling.

[gethly]

Try to make them pronounce nuclear instead of nucelar :D