China discovers and names new mineral with 72% germanium content: report - Global Times
www.globaltimes.cn
      • KuroXppi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        14 days ago

        Apparently it’s 乌斯河 same pinyin but different first two characters. Wusi seems to be a transliteration (i.e. phonetic, not primarily lexical meaning) of some place name or something. He means river. I’ll keep reading.

        Edit:

        发现于四川省乌斯河铅锌矿床

        Discovered in the Wusihe zinc and lead beds (deposits) in Sichuan province. So its name Wusiheite comes from that

        • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          14 days ago

          Interesting 🤔

          I read that the name may be from Yi and would just mean Dark River or maybe Crow River (dark like a crows feathers?)

          It’s always interesting to read up on place name etymology

          • KuroXppi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            14 days ago

            乌斯河镇，旧称窝石河，1964年修成昆铁路建火车站改名乌斯河

            Wushihe township, formerly known was Woshihe, changed its name to Wusihe in 1964 after a railway station was established there, sitting on the repaired Kunming line

            https://baike.baidu.com/item/乌斯河镇/1941990

            Woshihe means ‘the river cradling stones’ and is a pretty standard Han demonym, afaict, the article does not mention Yi etymology. The change to Wusi may have been one to make the standard Mandarin characters better match the local pronunciation, rather than the meaning, which is where the Yi pronunciation/influence could be coming in

              • KuroXppi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                3·
                14 days ago

                No worries! It was fun to do a bit of desktop research. I’m only iffy on my translation of the Kunming railway repair bit, I’m assuming the 昆kun铁 means that the township is on the Kunming route. I don’t use LLMs or machine translation, just a dictionary when I get stuck

                • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  4·
                  14 days ago

                  I usually use machine translation but pull up some dictionaries later it’s not very foolproof but speeds up the process when I don’t know what I’m looking for lmao. I know far more about indo european languages I’m trying to branch out into Arabic and Chinese. I probably wouldn’t die in china if I got dropped there but it wouldn’t be possible for a detailed conversation yet 😅