The first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, created many meaningless Chinese characters to be used as names for his descendants. These characters created have now become the sources of the Chinese names of elements in the periodic table.
by 22dmgxy
9 Comments
They became the periodic table for our sins
Now that’s an interesting fun fact.
THIS is why I come here.
Imagine finding out your great grandpa named you Zinc
Depicting the danish king thinking about what to call his son is ridiculous. If the kings name is Christian he will name his first born son Frederik, and the inverse of that. It is a completely planned out thing.
As someone who knows nothing of Chinese, how does that work? Did they attribute the characters to each element randomly, or did they define some kind of rule beforehand?
Damn, this is the same guy that was an orphan beggar monk and ended up becoming the leader of the anti-mongol uprising that reestablished ethnic Han rule over China, too.
It’s a good thing he coined new characters instead of using common ones because people are meant to avoid using (or even uttering) the emperor’s name as a sign of respect.
Why are we specifically compering danish king to ming dynasty emperor?