Talk:Aluminium

Re recent edits

This is the original edit.

@Nohat: I was going to say that it is best to use the WP:BRD cycle---that is, when undone, discuss that rather not undo back immediately---but I have checked your userpage and it says you're an admin, so I find myself struggling to understand what's happening here. You say my edits were an "unexplained reversion", whereas the opposite is true: I did provide summaries in both of my edits. Presumably neither was clear enough, however, so I'll be happy to clarify both of my edits.

please mind the sequence of derivations and keep it uniform: The word "aluminium" comes from "alumina." The word "alumina" comes from alum. The word "alum" comes from alumen. The word alumen comes from *alu-. These are four sentences, each saying something in the form of "A comes from B." Similar facts, similar structure of sentences. Clear enough. It is hardly beneficial to break that similarity between facts by different structure. If anything, I'd love to hear from you on this.

what about stibium?: precisely what the summary says. The point raised in the added sentence is that ancient names like ferrum and aurum end on -um. Okay. What about stibium, the Latin name for antimony? That runs contrary to the illusion a reader gets from the text that all ancient names ended on -um but not -ium. Also, oxide names don't end on -ite; that suffix is reserved for minerals.--R8R (talk) 16:01, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

For the etymological chain, I'm not sure I understand your point. I didn't change the structure of the derivations. I removed the irrelevant bit explicitly stating "aluminium oxide in modern nomenclature". If that bit is to be restored, it should at least punctuate "aluminium oxide" in quotes or italics. I left this fact implicit with the wiki link to aluminium oxide. I added links for both alumina and alum. I'm not really sure what the objection is here—is it that the first two derivations are conjoined into a single sentence and the other two are in separate sentences? It is my opinion that the most important things to know about the etymology of aluminum is it is named for the oxide, and the oxide is named for the mineral, which connects the history of the coinage of the name of the metal with the history of the discovery of the metal. The details about the meaning of the Latin root of the mineral's name and the PIE root just seem a lot more arcane to me, so it seemed sensible to structure how they are presented differently. If you're just skimming, you can get all the most important parts of the etymology in the first sentence, and the remaining sentences cover more of the linguistic esoterica.

Yes, my concern is that two sentences were merged into one. That's the thing that worries me, not specific wordings. The way the text was written originally was a bit easier to read, and that's what concerns me the most. I agree that the part on PIE is rather exotic to many readers but that merge does not improve the ease of reading. If you don't know in advance that you only need to read one sentence, then it's hard to follow that long sentence was a way of stressing the importance of those two steps in the sequence.

But while we're at it, I also do think that calling alumina an oxide is rather misleading. Technically speaking, yes, there are other oxides of aluminium, and to specify that we're talking about specifically alumina, you could name it "aluminium(III) oxide", but this one is the best-known one by far, so it is perfectly fine to refer to it as to "aluminium oxide" without any further qualifications. Also, aluminium was not named after alumina because it occurs in nature; it is because it was the earth that was obtained from alum, and alum is the thing that occurs naturally.

With my arguments in mind, could we settle on this:

Aluminium is named after alumina, or "aluminium oxide" in modern nomenclature. The word "alumina" comes from "alum", the mineral from which it was collected.

I didn't link alumina and alum originally because both are linked earlier in the article, but some link duplication is allowed, so I won't insist on removing the newly added links.--R8R (talk) 08:53, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

I honestly don't really have that strong of feeling about retaining my adjusted wording. I changed it in a way that seemed easier to read to me, but based on your comment "The way the text was written originally was a bit easier to read", I guess my instinct for readability is not as well-tuned as I thought. I personally find highly repetitive syntactic structures harder to read because if you need to re-read to understand, so many duplicate words and phrases give your eye less to grab onto as you scan. Regardless of which wording we end up with, I would prefer to retain the intention of implying that the first two parts of the etymology are both more important and of greater general interest than the other two, so I would be reluctant to return to the wording that presents all four parts of the etymology as though they are equivalent in significance. If you really think that separating them into separate sentences improves the readability, I won't object.

As for "an oxide" vs. "aluminium oxide" vs. "aluminium(III) oxide", I'm not sure what is misleading about calling alumina an oxide. A misleading wording would tend to make readers come to a false conclusion, but I'm not sure I see what false belief that a reader who sees an oxide might come to. You grant that there are multiple oxides of aluminum and that alumina is only one of them, so wouldn't the actually misleading wording be to just call it "aluminium oxide" without further clarification? I chose that wording specifically because a reader who is unfamiliar with the name alumina but already knows aluminum has multiple oxides might incorrectly conclude that "alumina" refers to all of them.

I'm not enamored with the wording "aluminium oxide" in modern nomenclature because it seems misplaced. The etymology is a sequence of facts that move backward in time, starting with the coining of aluminium. It's structurally anachronistic to present a parenthetical fact ("the name alumina has been replaced with aluminium oxide) which occurred chronologically after aluminium was coined into the middle of that sequence. Nohat (talk) 00:01, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Re "an oxide" vs. "aluminium oxide" vs. "aluminium(III) oxide": you're technically correct, what I mean is that I don't want to give an impression that there are other oxides which are comparable in terms of abundance or anything, really. There is no need to use the phrase aluminium oxide as the name. I could also see a phrase like "the most common oxide of aluminium": I think this phrase is fine with you?--R8R (talk) 13:52, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

As for "stibium", the Antimony page I think is pretty clear that the Latin name stibium comes from adding the -um suffix to the Greek stibi. The i comes from the root, not part of the suffix. That's actually the whole general point of the first half of the paragraph—the -ium suffix for metals with Latinate names can be analyzed as a folk etymology rebracketing of what was historically a -um suffix appended to roots ending in -i becoming understood as a novel -ium suffix. Similar folk etymologies have occurred in e.g. the spelling "virii" as a plural of virus, based presumably on mistaking forms like radii and brachii as having a -ii plural-marking suffix.

Point taken. That paragraph right now looks rather clumsy, particularly because of the seemingly unnecessarily long list of names of elements. I'll see if it can be helped with your observation in mind.--R8R (talk) 08:53, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

I completely agree that the paragraph is clumsy. It was clumsy before, and while my change introduced the OED citation for the -um suffix being used for metals in Latin, it's still a clunker. It presents a grab-bag of facts about the spellings of other elements in both English and Latin in an attempt to lay out the arguments for both the -um and -ium spellings using historical precedent. I think there are relevant facts on both sides of that argument—both the -um and -ium spellings have compelling historical precedents, and an improved version of that paragraph would signpost those arguments more explicitly.

I think the January 1811 citation from the Critical Review (which I recently discovered in the updated OED entry for aluminium) changes a lot about the story here. It means that the -ium spelling is in fact older than the -um spelling as far we know, as we don't have a citation for aluminum earlier than Davy's 1812 Elements of Chemical Philosophy. It's too bad we don't have an author for that Critical Review piece, as it was quite satisfying when I was able to unearth Thomas Young as the author of the Quarterly Review piece that argued for aluminium based on its "more classical sound" (whatever that means). The OED actually has an extended discussion about the 1811 citation which might be relevant to restructuring the section:

Quot. 1811 at sense A. 1 is a review of a lecture by H. Davy delivered in 1809 and published in 1810 ( Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.)  100 16–74). The published paper, on which the review appears to be based, does not name the new substance created by the experiments described; the ingredient alumina is referred to in the form alumine (see alumine n.).

I do wonder if Davy used a name during the lecture itself even if the published paper did not. We shall probably never know! In any case, I also think it would be worthwhile to at least consider how to give priority in telling the story of the origin of the name. The evidence we have now does show aluminium as older than aluminum but we don't quite know who proposed that name nor we know why Davy chose aluminum over aluminium in Elements of Chemical Philosophy the following year. I'm also not sure I quite understand what Young meant by aluminum having a "less classical sound" than aluminium. It sounds to me like a post-hoc rationalization of a purely personal preference, and frankly at odds with the actual historicity of -ium as a Classical Latin suffix for metal names. I do think it's fun when the OED's earliest citations are metalinguistic discussions of the words themselves, but I do think the elegant way which he phrased it ("for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound") makes it seem like a more compelling argument than it is, so I excised the full quotation from the text and kept only the phrase "less classical sound" with a little more circumspection that it was just one guy's opinion.

One other thing about this section that I wanted to bring up is the bit about alumium being "criticized by contemporary chemists from France, Germany, and Sweden, who insisted the metal should be named for the oxide". The relevant section from Richards 1896 reads as follows:

Davy next mixed alumina with potassium and iron filings, hoping that the iron would collect any metal reduced from the alumina. On melting this mixture a button resulted which was white and harder than iron, and was undoubtedly an alloy of iron and aluminium, but Davy could not separate the two metals. In concluding the recital of his experiments he said, "Had I been fortunate enough to isolate the metal after which I sought, I would have given it the name alumium.

In making this suggestion it is perfectly plain that Davy intended this word to represent the metal from alum, simply starting with alum, and adding ium as the proper termination. Objections were very soon thereafter made to this proposed name, not to the termination ium, which was considered absolutely proper, but to the root or stem of the word. It was maintained by French, German and Swedish writers that the name of the new metal should be derived from its oxide, and that the stem of the word should therefore be alumin, and thence the name aluminium. Davy was influenced by these criticisms to the extent of changing in 1812 to alumin-um, but no writers, except a very few English and, in recent years, some Americans, have used this spelling.

The book overall seems pretty credible, and there are plenty of citations in it. There aren't any for this passage, though, and so we don't know exactly who these French, German, and Swedish writers who objected are, or what their objections were, other than what Richards asserts. The way the article now reads implies these criticisms are well-established facts, but I would not be so certain if that passage is the only evidence we have of them, especially since the book was written nearly 100 years after the events it reports on (and over 120 years before now). Richards' knowledge of this would have to be based either on written records, which he doesn't cite, or oral history, which is not exactly known for being reliable.

I think it is probable that the claims are factual, but I don't think the evidence we have is sufficient for the boldness of the assertion in our text.

Finally, I also want to mention an issue with the claim that the -ium spelling is "the standard in most other languages". The citation is for Powell 2015; however I don't have a copy to reference, so I don't know exactly what he says. But, our article here has 176 interlanguage links to the other language Wikipedias, and only 24 of them use the spelling aluminium (including "Simple English" and two different varieties of Norwegian). I think you'd be hard pressed to convince anyone that 13.6% counts as "most". Maybe it is meant to weight by number of speakers, but of the top 30 languages, only English, French, and German use the spelling aluminium. Maybe what is meant is that most other languages use a name for the element that includes a high front vowel or palatalization at the end of the root, but that claim seems to me so nuanced and marginal as to be essentially pointless to include. I would advocate either eliminating the claim, or tempering it somehow.

Nohat (talk) 00:01, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

To be fair, I don't think the 1811 citation changes much. I mean, it's relevant, and it should definitely be mentioned, it's just that it doesn't look like Davy thought much of those spellings one way or another. He didn't even insist the name should be that, merely that it "might be called" that. You see, Oersted didn't even bother to claim the discovery because he didn't think of it much, so I can easily see Davy not worry too much about spellings.

I'll see what I could find to help your concern re Richards. Not right now maybe, but eventually, when I am preparing for GAN.

I agree with your call for tempering the claim. I have changed the phrase a bit, and I will revisit this question further during my preparation for GAN.--R8R (talk) 13:52, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

I take the point about minerals with -ite but the general point is that these element names are derived by morphological process applied to the names of the materials from which the elements were first isolated. I would definitely agree there is opportunity for improvements to the wording there.

Nohat (talk) 23:05, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

So far, I've been able to find a reference to what is likely meant to be the Swedish criticism: Berzelius published a list of elements in 1811, and he argued elements should have Latin names (including even natrium and kalium). See here; an excerpt from Berzelius's book featuring aluminium, natrium, and kalium can be found here. This publishing was consequential at the day and it looks like it's the most important development when it comes to this spelling problem, and I'll leave out the unidentified French and German criticisms. I have yet to find the confirmation to the idea that the name alum was English and alumina was Latin, and that was why the name for the metal should be derived from the latter.--R8R (talk) 13:44, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

It appears the major part of the thinking was that the name of the metal should have a Latin progenitor.--R8R (talk) 14:52, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

I am satisfied with what the article says right now, though I'm open for comments.--R8R (talk)

@R8R:Thank you for finding the Berzelius citation. I think that clarifies quite a bit about the Richards claim about "contemporary chemists from France, Germany, and Sweden", which I see you have now excised entirely. I do have a few quibbles with the current state of linguistics citations in the article:

• I don't think the Kvande 2008 article (which I found that you can download in full) is a particularly compelling source for claims about the etymology of aluminum. Kvande is an engineer and the article was published in JOM: the journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, not a linguistics or lexicography journal. While it has some interesting biographical information about Davy, it cites no sources, and even describes itself as an article to "celebrate that aluminum now is 200 years old", not as a serious work of scholarship, and certainly not a work of linguistic or etymological scholarship. Honestly, it does not have much information about the etymological history of aluminum beyond what was in the Wikipedia article circa 2007 and even errs in some of the details: it says "First he spelled it alumium, and then he changed it to aluminum, while finally settling on aluminium in 1812" when I don't believe we have evidence Davy himself ever used the spelling "aluminium". I'm not convinced it is worthy of being used as a citation source for any etymological claims.
• I don't believe that the statement that "alumina is the plural of the word alumen" is a correct claim about Latin grammar. The -‍men suffix with which which Latin alūmen was derived from alum is a nominalization suffix (forming nouns from verbs or adjectives) akin to English -‍ment—not a plural marker. Not to mention that Latin alum and alūmen and English alumina, alumine, and aluminium are all non-count (mass) nouns for which the concept of pluralization is nonsensical.
• The Oxford English Dictionary entry for aluminium, says that it is derived from the English word alumine, and the OED entry for alumine, which has English-language citations dating back to 1682, says it was borrowed from French. It was the French who borrowed/inherited the word from classical Latin alūmen. If we're going to have an extended section in the article about the etymology, I think we should include all the steps and cite reputable sources for etymologies. These OED citations are a better starting point for that than what we currently have.
• The phrasing "languages based on the Latin alphabet" is not really any better than "Latin-based languages": other than Romance languages, no language is "based on Latin" nor can any language be legitimately described as "based on the Latin alphabet". A linguistically sensible claim might be something like "languages written using the Latin alphabet". However, if we return to the interwiki list, and only include languages which are written using the Latin alphabet, we're looking at 94 languages, and of those, only 28 spell it "aluminium", which is less than 30%. While "many" is a weasel word which is not well-defined, given these actual statistics, I just don't see how a minority of a bizarrely constrained list of languages spell their name for aluminum makes an interesting, useful, or compelling point. Since we have already excised the information about the spelling and etymology of analogous elements (with both -‍um and -‍ium spellings) then we should leave out the information about how foreign languages spell their name for aluminum as well.
• We still are citing Powell 2015 (AMGLISH: Two nations divided by a common language) for the claims that aluminium "remains the standard in many other languages based on the Latin alphabet" and that Hall's use of aluminum may have been a typo. This source was not published by a reputable publisher of scholarly works, or even of general interest nonfiction, but by BookBaby, a vanity press which does no fact checking or peer review of any kind (and they list it in the "humor" genre). I have not read the cited section of the source that discusses aluminum, but I am reluctant to give the book much credence of any kind based on a cursory read of the introduction, which appears to be chock full of exaggerated and unsourced nonsense. I think the article would be better if we removed the Powell citation altogether and just omitted mentioning those two claims at all.

Nohat (talk) 04:31, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

I made a couple edits along these lines to correct these deficiencies. I am open to hear arguments in favor of restoring the Kvande, Powell, and Spectra Aluminum Products citations.

I would be in favor of restoring the "this is the earliest known published writing to use either of the modern spellings" for the 1811 Davy lecture summary. Perhaps if we clarify "earliest known" as "earliest citation in OED" or similar. (They are one and the same to me—if OED could antedate it, they certainly would). Nohat (talk) 23:44, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

Sorry to keep you waiting; I'll have responded by the end of next week at the very latest.--R8R (talk) 10:11, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

@Nohat: I have spent some more time clarifying the matters. Here's what I think so far.

Not all sources may be perfect, that's true. It sometimes happens that even the most authoritative sources err (for example, different respectable handbooks disagree on which element is the densest). As such, I strive to explain what's correct (based on understanding of the matter) rather than what the most admired sources say, although I still try to have some standard for source quality. I may end up with sources that are not in the first league, and sometimes even below what I'd want to see in an article, in which case I should try to find a better source.

As for criticism of alumium: I haven't been able to identify the French and German critics, but I saw a source claim this spelling was objected to by the French. As such, it seems in order to restore the Richards claim, which I will do later.

As for Davy and aluminium: indeed, he may not have used this spelling at all, which is why I don't want to add any more relevance to a reviewer mentioning it. "This is the earliest known published writing to use either of the modern spellings" sounds like a big deal, which, however, it is not. Also, did OED really claim that? Could you give me a quote?

I don't know almost anything about Latin grammar. Does alumina even sound like the plural for alumen? A source says it does, but I'm ready to tone it down to "based on," rather than "plural." To be clear, however, Latin alumen is pluralizable (see Wiktionary]), and English alum certainly is: there are different kinds of alum, such as "potash alum" or "neutral alum." Some English words ending with -ment can also be pluralized ("developments").

No language is based on its alphabet, you're correct about that. In fact, in countries neighboring mine, alphabets have been changed a lot over the last century or so, and two are making a change right now. I realized that wording was bad when I was writing it, it's just that nothing better popped up in my mind. I do think, however, that spellings in other languages are notable in this particular case, because a name of a chemical element wasn't necessarily thought to be limited to one language. Think about tungsten/wolfram for how other languages can in principle be notable in element names.

It looks to me that Hall's use of "aluminum" may have been a typo indeed, and I'll restore that claim, even if I'll have to find a better source for it (this shouldn't be difficult, I've seen this claim several times).

I'll act upon my thoughts later; for now, comments are welcome.--R8R (talk) 13:09, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

I made a few changes. I'm satisfied with the results; comments are welcome.--R8R (talk) 19:04, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

New information

I noticed that this piece of information wasn't there so is it feasible to add this: Aluminium is used to make reflective surfaces and paint. Some string instruments, especially guitars, have aluminum bodies. This piece of information was gotten from Thoughtco link is https://www.thoughtco.com/atomic-number-13-interesting-aluminum-facts-606479 Space chinedu (talk) 05:18, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry found out that the sight is copyrighted Space chinedu (talk) 05:37, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Aluminium/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Kepler-1229b (talk · contribs) 18:03, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	A rather technical topic.
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	No issues noted.
	2c. it contains no original research.	Sourced.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.	No apparent plagiarism or copyright violations.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	No issues noted.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	Stable.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.	Fine.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.
	7. Overall assessment.	Pass?

@Kepler-1229b: Do you have any specific concerns re 1a? Double sharp (talk) 13:40, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

@Kepler-1229b: Double sharp (talk) 13:51, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

No. 🪐Kepler-1229b | talk | contribs🪐 21:47, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

• An observation, the first five (5) sentences of the lead all start "Aluminium..." - that should be tweaked if possible....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:46, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
  • @Casliber: Tweaked it. Double sharp (talk) 11:32, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

So pass? Keresluna (talk) 18:03, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

@Kepler-1229b:Keresluna (talk) 22:49, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Pass, it has been two months. I see no reason to oppose that change. Keresluna (talk) 17:54, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

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Semi-protected edit request on 19 September 2021

Evidence published in 2015 seems to indicate that for Alzheimer's patients aluminium may act by electrostatically crosslinking[disambiguation needed] proteins thus down regulating genes in the superior temporal gyrus.[176]

The linked study in ref 176 was published in 1989, so the 2015 claim is false. This paragraph is out of line with the rest of the article, therefore I request either this paragraph is deleted or updated to the 1989 year, which is out of date compared to current literature. Electrostatically crosslinking proteins and down regulating genes is a contemptuous claim, not replicated in recent studies. 88.208.96.218 (talk) 20:44, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

I sometimes disagree with WP:SECONDARY, but it seems to me that "seems to indicate" is not the usual standard for articles.