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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

> It is a glass, made from a mixture of the fluorides of zirconium, barium, lanthanum, aluminium and sodium, that is therefore known as ZBLAN (sodium has the chemical symbol Na).

Acronyms!!! I know it is weird to bring this up but there is no NA in ZBLAN! It is AN and doesn't represent Sodium.

Would be neat if we could find a bunch of cases like this and give reason why we can expand into space manufacturing and a moon base. I doubt we will see this in our life times. I just can't see the financial benefit unless it is 100% automated.

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From wikipedia: "...including a family of glasses ZBLAN with a composition ZrF4-BaF2-LaF3-AlF3-NaF."

Which seems to make sense.

That 100% does make seance BUT the author said Na is for Sodium which was made it not make sense to me.

They probably confused 'sodium' with 'salt' and missed the Natrium in NaCl.

Apologies for linking to Quora:

https://www.quora.com/Who-renamed-Natrium-and-Kalium-to-Sodi...

If you want to explain an acronym that has its basis in the names of chemical elements you should probably use the same words the scientists that came up with the acronym used.

They said "sodium has the chemical symbol Na" which is completely true, if intuitive.

Na is the chemical symbol for sodium because natrium is the Latin name.

Na is the chemical symbol for sodium. What's strange in the statement?

N is the first letter of Natrium, the Latin name of sodium from where the chemical symbol comes from. So I would say that the acronym makes perfect sense.

They seem to be using Na as a justification for using N, since the other chemical symbols don't match the acronym either. Unless they're just using the first letter of each symbol, either way it's not a great name.

If you use the Latin name for sodium, it flows much more clearly:

ZBLAN: Zirconium, Barium, Lanthanum, Aluminium, Natrium.

My grandmother, who was a pharmacist, prefers to call it natrium rather than sodium. I don’t know if there are any industries or similar where it’s commonly called natrium.

The sentence would have read better if the aside had instead been rendered “(sodium is also known as natrium)” or similar.

Some languages use natrium instead of sodium.

I did some statistics on the translations at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sodium#Translations

Of 107 unique language-word pairs (some languages have multiple words for sodium) there are 53 starting with [nNнν], all of which are some variation of natrium (they are in 51 languages because Icelandic and Roman have two variants each). Likewise, there are 37 starting with [sṣ], all of which are some variation of sodium. The remaining 17 are either different or no transliteration is available to check.

Fun fact that I recently learned, the person who named aluminum was Humphry Davy and he originally suggested "alumium" but ended up choosing "aluminum".

It would be interesting to find out how that became "aluminium" in England. Perhaps they were more interested in retaining the "ium" suffix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology

Might want to review what an acronym is. :)

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