Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Periodic Table of Dmitri Mendeleev and Sanskrit grammar

Grammar of elements 
Who would have thought that there is some connection between Sanskrit alphabet and the periodic table?

Periodic Table
The periodic table is a two-dimensional display of Chemical elements arranged according to their atomic numbers. The rows are called periods, and when you move from left to right the atomic numbers increase. There are gaps in some rows to ensure that Chemical elements with similar properties stay in the same column.(http://vishal12.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/sankrit-in-the-periodic-table/)

Dmitri Mendeleev
When the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his periodic table of elements in 1869, there were just fifty-nine entries on it. The table grouped those elements
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev
8 February 1834 – 2 February 1907
pic credit:http://www.rsc.org/education/
teachers/resources/periodictable/pre16/
develop/mendeleev.htm

The table also contained thirty-three empty spaces that implied that there were elements still to be discovered. He gave these still-hypothetical elements names like  ekasilicon, ekaaluminium and ekaboron (germanium, gallium and scandium, respectively). “Eka-” is a Sanskrit prefix meaning “one,” so you can think of the names as silicon 1, aluminum 1, and so on. For his predicted eight elements, he used the prefixes of eka, dvi, and tri (Sanskrit one, two, three) in their naming. By year 1939, all of Mendeleev’s boxes had been filled in; the last one was “ekacesium,” now called francium.

Numerals in Sanskrit
Mendeleev chose Sanskrit names (now-superseded) for eight elements in the periodic table. His chosen names are given as follows for eight elements which he predicted but were not discovered in his days.


Eka-aluminium —– Gallium
Eka-boron —– Scandium
Eka-silicon —– Germanium
Eka-manganese —– Technetium
Tri-manganese —– Rhenium
Dvi-tellurium —– Polonium
Dvi-caesium —– Francium
Eka-tantalum —– Protactinium
(http://www.boiledbeans.net/2008/04/13/eek-do-teen/)

It appears that Mendeleev was inspired by the two-dimensional arrangement of Sanskrit sounds, which he indirectly acknowledged in his naming scheme of chemical elements. Also, Eka which is the Sanskrit for one or first, is a prefix which was applied to the first undiscovered element in a group of the periodic system

What Mendeleev couldn’t have imagined was that scientists would one day begin creating elements not found naturally.(http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/unumpentium-the-new-artificial-element.html)

Dmitri Mendeleev and Sanskrit 

By giving Sanskrit names to his "missing" elements, Mendeleev showed his appreciation and debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created sophisticated theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds. According to Professor Paul Kiparsky of Stanford University, Mendeleev was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Böhtlingk, who was preparing the second edition of his book on Pāṇini at about this time, and Mendeleev wished to honor Pāṇini with his nomenclature. Noting that there are striking similarities between the periodic table and the introductory Śiva Sūtras in Pāṇini's grammar, Prof. Kiparsky says:
[T]he analogies between the two systems are striking. Just as Panini found that the phonological patterning of sounds in the language is a function of their articulatory properties, so Mendeleev found that the chemical properties of elements are a function of their atomic weights. Like Panini, Mendeleev arrived at his discovery through a search for the "grammar" of the elements...(share courtesy:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Mendeleev)

Notes for further study:
Max Muller, the great Indologist, Sanskrit pundit and an authority on Veda. sums up his version, of Sanskrit language and it's contribution to the rest of the Europen language in following lines: "the Sanskrit, by it's most ancient literary documents, the Vedas, it can teach us lessons which nothing else can teach, as to the origin of our own language, the first formation of our own concepts, and the true natural gems of all that is comprehended under the name of civilization, at least the civilization of the Aryan race, that race to which we and all the greatest nations of the world - the Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and last, not least, the Teutons belong.
(India-What can it teach us by F.Max Muller, page:107, penguin books publication, year 2000)

It is interesting to note that in above studies, Max Muller has given many examples of the mentioned all 7 races, there are still many Sanskrit root words, which still exits with the same meanings.

In another studies based on genetics and Indo Europen language relationship:
Genetics of Indo-Europen populations: The past, the future
by: Balanovsky, Oleg, Utevska, Olga, Balanovska Elena
Journal of Language Relationship, No. 9,2013 - p 23-3
We describe our experience of comparing genetic and linguistic data in relation to the Indo-European problem. Our recent comparison of the genetic variation with lexicostatistical data on North Caucasian populations identified the parallel evolution of genes and languages; one can say that history of the populations was reflected in the linguistic and the genetic mirrors. For other linguistic families one can also expect this similarity, though it could be blurred by elite dominance and other events affecting gene and lexical pools differently. Indeed, for Indo-European populations of Europe, in contrast with the Caucasus case, the partial correlation indicates a more important role of geography (r = 0.32) rather than language (r = 0.21) in structuring the gene pool; though high pair correlation (r = 0.67) between genetics and linguistics distances allows using the lexicostatistical data as good predictors of genetic similarity between populations. The similarity between genetics and linguistics was identified for both Y­chromosomal data (populations are clustered according to their language) and mitochondrial DNA (populations are clustered according to their language group). In general, we believe that there is no single genetic marker definitively linked with the expansion of Indo-European populations. Instead, we are starting a new research project aiming to identify a set of markers partially linked with separate Indo-European groups, thus allowing partial reconstructions of the multi-layer mosaic of Indo-European movements.(http://www.jolr.ru/)

some related blog post of the author:

Sanskrit affinity:
http://creative.sulekha.com/why-sanskrit-is-the-mother-of-all-indo-european-languages-and-how-the-europeans-concealed-it_523229_blog


An interactive Periodic Table link:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chemistry-the-elements-revealed-interactive-periodic-table/

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