Oxygen is known to everyone, but why is there a "sheep" under the word "oxygen"?
The reason is simple, because Oxygen was introduced to China in 1855 by the British missionary Benjamin Hobson (1816-1873), which was originally translated as "nourishing gas".
Chinese the newly created word "oxygen" is not transliterated like many other elements, nor is it directly transliterated (Oxygen's meaning is "acid hormone", "acid mother", "acid maker"), but completely uses the other properties of oxygen to create the word "oxygen". This point has been made very clear in the New Edition of the Naturalist:". Oxygen is the breath of nourishment, and people must die without oxygen. Chemical Prognosis also says: ""
Yang Qi was later written as oxygen because it is sometimes easy to misunderstand the meaning of writing only, "Medicine of the Republic of China".
In hindsight, oxygen is a good new word, but it should be noted that the translation of elements has a competitive relationship at the beginning, and oxygen originally had a translation, that is:
This word is obvious, the gas word is under the "夋", this "夋" is actually the word "acid", remove the unitary for the sake of writing simplicity, the whole word is the paraphrase of Oxygen (acid) (people found that oxygen can synthesize a lot of acid). So why was this translation eventually eliminated? This is because people had already realized that "acid" was not scientific to name oxygen. Ren Hongjun's "The Theory of The Naming of Chemical Elements" says: ""
After the nourishment (oxygen), there was also a glyph "neon" (1927):
The explanation for the creation of this word is that eucalyptus and yang are pronounced the same, and oxygen can produce water (H2O), and the word water, the saying, explains: "Water ... There is a slight yang (yang) qi also". However, this interpretation was considered too far-fetched, so the word "neon" was not used. But then again, in a pure sense, the word "oxygen" is not perfect, because the raising under the gas word is omitted as a sheep, so there will be a problem at the beginning of this article.