Re: English syllable structure (was, for some reason: Re: Llirine: How to creat a language)

Roger Mills wrote:
>Andreas Johansson wrote:
> >While this seems to be question of education style and ideology rather
>than
> >of anything language-related*, I'd like to point out that I know several
> >people who now the table of elements by heart (in Swedish, but from the
> >Mandarin point of view Swedish is essentially English). Also, it's very
> >questionable whether the average person NEEDS to know all the elements.
>
>Alas, I knew most of it during highschool chemistry...and wish I could
>remember even a bit of it now.  Since I always liked useless and otherwise
>marginal things, I was quite fascinated by the "Rare Earths", always
>printed
>off to the side and ignorable. Even the teacher couldn't say much about
>them.  What, I still wonder, are the uses of  ytterbium (??)  and all those
>other strange elements?
There are uses of pretty much all of them (except francium, astatine
(spelling?) and the really heavy ones), but I don't remember off-hand any
for ytterbium.

BTW, ytterbium is one of the unreasonably large number of elements with a
Sweden-related name. It is, along with ytrium, terbium and erbium, named
after Ytterby gruva outside Stockholm. There's also holmium, named after
"Holmia", which's Latin for Stockholm. Then there's nobelium, vanadin (from
Vanadis, a Nordic goddess better known as Freyja), tungsten (Swedish for
"heavy stone", absurdly enough known as "wolfram" in Swedish) and Thorium
(after the Nordic god Thor). I may be forgettin one or two.

                                           Andreas

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