Hi First off, Tom is right - in science we should have standards (though don't get me onto propanone, ethanoic acid [obviously named after Ethan Merritt], spirits of salt, oil of vitriol etc).
There ain't no such thing as Latin singular or Latin plural! Latin nominative singular or nominative plural, perhaps, but on their own, singular or plural only give you 1/6 of the story. According to wiktionary (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sulfur#Etymology) your OED is incorrect; I was a bit surprised that the OED would give singular and plural, when I was taught to quote the nominative singular and genitive singular to indicate the declension (which indicates how Latin nouns decline). Etymological logic has plenty to do with English spelling - to a large extent, it's why we spell things the way we do (e.g. phosphorus & Christmas, which would "more sensibly" be spelt without their "h"s, but keep them because we spell the Greek characters "phi" and "chi". Even weird things usually have some justification drawn from their roots. I don't really care how artistic prose is spelt (or poetry, for that matter - Faerie Queene, anyone?) but scientific prose should at the very least try be written according to some agreed standard. Harry -- Dr Harry Powell > On 23 Jul 2019, at 22:39, Goldman, Adrian <[email protected]> wrote: > > ..and responding in the same vein: > > my OED says that its etymology also comes from the Latin sulfur, sulphura in > the plural. So there is an etymological basis for the ph, even if it doesn’t > come from Greek. > > Plus, since when has etymological logic has _anything_ to do with English > spelling? > > Finally, it may be how the RSC is spelling it, but I would take a fair bet > that writers of English prose today (pace America), contemplating an stinky > inferno, will write “sulphurous flames”, not the unattractive and less stinky > “sulfurous ones”. > > Adrian > > >> On 23 Jul 2019, at 22:21, CCP4BB >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hi >> >> Going off at a tangent... >> >> The accepted spelling by the Royal Society of Chemistry (i.e. the >> professional body representing chemists in the U.K.) since at least the >> early 1990s has been "sulfate" too. "Sulphur", etc, has been deprecated for >> quite some time. Why? Well, there's no good etymological reason for the "ph" >> in "sulphate". My 1984 copy of Greenwood and Earnshaw's "Chemistry of the >> Elements", written in Yorkshire, uses "sulfur" etc throughout. >> >> "Phosphorus" comes from the Greek, so retains the "ph"s on both sides of the >> pond. >> >> Element 13 appears to have started life as "alumium", mutated to "aluminum", >> and finally (in the English speaking world outside North America) settled >> down as "aluminium". >> >> Harry >> -- >> Dr Harry Powell >> >> On 23 Jul 2019, at 17:12, Engin Özkan <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>>> On 7/23/19 3:35 AM, [email protected] wrote: >>>> No longer those 20 odd names for ammonium sulphate >>> >>> You mean ammonium *sulfate*. As it is called across the pond. :) >>> >>> On a related note on common nomenclature for recording crystallization >>> experiments that Janet brought up: >>> >>> I find it odd that we still do not report cryo-protection methods and >>> conditions in PDB depositions. Given that a large fraction of the small >>> molecules observed in crystal structures are derived from the >>> cryo-protectants, one would think that reporting the contents of that >>> solution (and pH) would be paramount to a PDB deposition. Surely, the >>> crystallographic experiment has changed since 1990/use of synchrotron >>> sources, which PDB has adjusted well to in most other aspects (e.g., >>> including reporting of synchrotron x-ray optics and all the new >>> detectors during submission). >>> >>> Engin >>> >>> >>> ######################################################################## >>> >>> To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: >>> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 >> >> To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: >> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 >> > > > To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1
