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Improving Mindat.orgMineral pronounciations

27th Jan 2015 01:54 UTCPaul Brandes 🌟 Manager

Recently at a mineral section meeting of our local Society, it was mentioned how it would be nice for Mindat to include a feature where by users could click on a mineral name or tag and get the "official" pronunciation for it. I suppose this would be similar to what is found on WebMineral.com and there might be a copyright issue, but I believe this would be a useful feature to have on "the world's largest public database of mineral information".

Thanks,

Paul

27th Jan 2015 02:05 UTCBob Harman

PAUL, Good idea. I have heard the mineral CHALCOPYRITE pronounced both ways, with the "CHAL"….. like CALcite and the "CHAL" like CHurch. I have never really found out if one is correct or preferred over the other. CHEERS……BOB

27th Jan 2015 02:54 UTCAlfredo Petrov Manager

Well, it's a name of Greek origin, so it all depends whether you want to pronounce it the original Greek way or not, which is like "K", not like the "ch" in "church". Many English speakers will disagree, but who will decide? Minerals don't have "official" pronounciations, yet, so who will decide which way is correct? The IMA doesn't yet have an "official pronunciation committee" (and I hope they never do ;-) - they have plenty of more important matters of science to deal with).

When minerals are named after people, it would be logical to pronounce the mineral the way the person pronounces their own name, but we often don't even follow that simple rule in english. Just ask the average english-speaking collector to pronounce "hauyn", "whewellite", and "sugilite". The latter, for example, named after Dr Sugi, whose name has a hard "g" as in "geese", not a soft "g" like "gin", has been mispronounced for so long in english that the mispronunciation has become perhaps too deeply rooted in speech to correct it now. Similarly with minerals named after places - Shouldn't we pronounce the mineral like the locals pronounce the place name? So "Jarosite", for example, should be pronounced like "Harosite" in english, but you'd have a hard time convincing english speakers that "harosite" was official.

I fear that if we try to decree "official pronunciations" for mineral names, we'd be opening a pandora's box leading to endless discussion and insoluble arguments.... but, hey, that's what the internet was invented for, wasn't it? ;-)

27th Jan 2015 03:37 UTCEd Clopton 🌟 Expert

Years ago while visiting Willard Roberts (senior author, with Weber & Rapp, of the first Encyclopedia of Minerals, among other things) in his office at the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City, I asked about including pronunciations in the next edition of the Encyclopedia. He said that someone had tried it in one edition of a big mineralogical reference work years before (he named it; it may have been Hey in his Chemical Index of Minerals) and "opened such a can of worms" that he abandoned it in subsequent editions.

Many names I have only read in print and never heard pronounced, or heard only after having just read them for many years. I never would have guessed that bismuthinite would be "biz MYOO thun ite". Goethite is a hard one, perhaps the most diversely pronounced species out there, the first syllable pronounced GOE, GAY, GER, or with an authentic German o-umlaut, and the th rendered either as T or TH. That makes eight possible pronunciations, and I've heard them all.

Good luck to anyone who undertakes standardizing mineral pronunciations!

27th Jan 2015 04:12 UTCDoug Daniels

Poor Goethe...he shoulda changed his name had he known a mineral would be named after him.

27th Jan 2015 08:52 UTCJolyon Ralph Founder

This will come :)

My plan is to allow people to upload their own pronunciation where they are then listed with the name and nationality of the uploader, because if you want to learn how to pronounce Dzierżanowskite it really should be someone Polish who tells you this. etc.

29th Jan 2015 01:48 UTCPaul Brandes 🌟 Manager

Thanks Jolyon.

I'm sure the current version is hardly an official guide, and heaven knows there would be endless discussion as Alfredo mentioned. Still, something is better than nothing, right? ;-)

29th Jan 2015 17:17 UTCEd Clopton 🌟 Expert

My previous post was prepared while at work without access to my shelf of references. The editor's response to a letter in Mineralogical Record 25(4):301-2 (July-August 1994) confirms that it was the 1955 edition of Hey's Chemical Index of the Minerals that included British pronunciations with which much of the rest of the world disagreed.

The subject of the letter itself was the then-newly discovered species szenicsite. The writer had purchased specimens at the Tucson show from Terry and Marissa Szenics, after whom the species was named, and had asked them about the proper pronunciation of the name. Terry said "zenicsite", and Marissa said "I say 'thenicsite' because I'm Peruvian." Thus the two people for whom the species is jointly named pronounce it differently. So much for settling such questions by appealing to original sources!

Wendell Wilson went on to say that although the IMA had never sought to rule on official pronunciations, he learned from Dr. Carl Francis (author of the then-forthcoming species description) that the official publication would give "zenicsite" as the official pronunciation.

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