The following Language Log post by Victor Mair analyzes the Chinese characters for the Periodic elements. If you look at the picture, you can see how radicals (e.g. for gas/vapor and for gold/metal) combine with other elements to create new characters. As Mair points out, only a few common elements (e.g. silver, lead, mercury) had characters in common usage. Even the pronunciation for newer elements are adaptations of the Western element code (e.g. Sodium (Na) = )

This is as good an example as I’ve seen of how Chinese writing and phonology works with new terms.

Some Gas Elements (气)

Hydrogen (H) qīng

氫:氢

Helium (He) hài

氦:氦

Xenon (Xe) xiān

氙:氙

Older Names

Silver (Ag) yín

銀:银

Gold (Au) jīn

金:金

Unicode comes up again because newer element names have not necessarily been incorporated into different fonts or even into the Unicode standard.

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