Monday, August 6, 2012

Nitrogen group elements, nitrungar

1) phosphorus
lýsill (from ljós, I deliberately made it sounds like the preceding element kísill)


2) arsenic
a) illmálmungur (evil metalloid), eiturmálmungur (poison-metalloid), ómálmungur (Compounds of this metalloid were historically known as deadly poisons. Despite the fact that also selenium and tellurium form exceedingly toxic compounds, it is this classical ill reputation of arsenic compounds that makes a term like "poison-metalloid" the most transparent solution for this element.
b) litgylli (from litargull, yellow orpiment): The word arsenic was borrowed from the Syriac word al zarniqa and the Persian word Zarnikh, meaning "yellow orpiment". This was arguably the most famous arsenic compound in antiquity.  The word orpiment itself is a corruption of the Latin auripigmentum (gold pigment) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpiment
In Icelandic it was translated gulllitarefni, which can easily be reduced to litargull (colour-gold or pigment-gold), from which litgylli can be derived to serve as a designation of elemental arsenic.
c) eiturkóngur, kóngaeitur: Owing to its use by the ruling class to murder one another and its potency and discreetness, arsenic has been called the Poison of Kings and the King of Poisons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic (see under History)
d) lýsilbróðir (brother of phosphorus)


3) Antimony
brátin, hvarmtin (= ‘Eye-lid tin’)
Long before the element was isolated and the most part of its history, antimony was known in the form of its trisulphide stibnite, which oriental women used to darken their eyes.  The term ‘kohl’was the Semitic word used in early Biblical references and is the Arabic word for the mineral. The word ‘surma’, which denotes the same product has become the name for antimony in most Altaic and some slavic languages. The native Mongolian term for this element ‘budag’ also means ‘eye-pigment’.  For more information: http://www.vanderkrogt.net/elements/element.php?sym=Sb
My personal favourite construction is brátin, because many kennings refering to the eye in Old Icelandic poetry are similarly formed stem-compounds with brá (eye-lid, eye-lash): brátungl, brásól, brágeislar, respectively the moon, sun and the beams of the eye-lids or eye-lashes, all poetic designations of the eye.  Other examples are bráregn or brádögg (respectively "rain" and "dew" of the eye-lid, which refers to tears) and brávöllur (eye-lid field, the forehead).
As a term denoting the element's chief ore, stibnite, the Germans used spiessglanz (spear-lustre), which could be icelandicized to geirglit, which I found an unpoetic calque of the German word.  The Ritmálssafn orðabókar háskólans mentions the unadapted germanism spísglans, which for me, as a purist, is hard to palate. For that reason I made my own neologism: ígulglit. Search Google images for stibnite and you will see that the description ígulglit is by no means far-fetched.


4) bismuth
öskublý (After Agricola' s "plumbum cinerum", ash-lead, which is still mentioned in Dutch and German dictionaries as respectively "aslood" and "aschenblei".)

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