On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Erik Garrés wrote:
> Marco Cimarosti wrote :
> >Or did you compare the whole periodical table against the whole CJK blocks
> >in Unicode? In this case, could you mention a few chemical elements whose
> >names are missing?
>
> Maybe they have strokes for the name of the element (Example "Oxygen",
> "Gold", etc) but I'm sure they do not have strokes for the Symbol of the
> element, they use the same as all of us: "O" for Oxygen, "Au" for Gold, etc.
And like everyone else, elements such as gold can be represented with
two Latin letters, <A> and <u>.
As for the Han characters for the elements, I am confident that the ones
with atomic numbers 1-103 are in the BMP, in both traditional and
simplified forms, even if they might not all be available in a legacy
character set.
Characters which are potentially missing include:
- Characters for elements with atomic numbers above 103 (in either
traditional or simplified forms, if applicable). These are recent,
and there have been multiple names for some of them, due to competing
naming proposals or pre-standardization by IUPAC (or people ignoring
IUPAC). There was probably a character created for each of the
competing names--I believe the one for "Hahnium" is one of these.
- Alternative or deprecated characters that were used at some point
in time. Usually it has been a tweak in the phonetic part of the
character.
- Characters for as-yet unnamed elements, created in a similar fashion
as names like "unnilseptium" (107-ium). (Yes, I know 107 has a name
now.)
I suspect if they are not in the BMP, then they might have made it into
Plane 2. I know some of the alternative/deprecated ones (if they are not
too recent) are in the _Hanyu Da Zidian_ dictionary (mid-1980's), one of
the sources for CJK Extension B.
There are also characters for certain compounds, but I am unsure about
their status.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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