Global Cognates for Materials and Chemicals


Materials 

In languages around the world, one can easily find words for materials like wood, copper, steel, and earthenware that have been around for ages. Basic terms referring to materials like wood, metal, and clay across languages have often been discovered independently from one another across multiple people groups. Even within a single language family, the word for a material as old and as widely used as iron can very enormously.

Words for 'iron' in Indo-European languages

English iron

Russian zeležo (зележо)

Spanish hierro

Albanian hekur

Persian âhan (آهن)


Words for 'iron' in Niger-Congo languages

        Zulu         insimbi

        Akan        dade   

        KiKongo  kibende

        Swahili    chuma


Words for 'iron' in Austronesian languages

        Indonesian    besi

        Tagolog        bakal

        Cebuano       puthaw

        Hawaiian      hao


As such words for these older materials certainly don’t qualify as global cognates. That being said, in the last two decades, there has been a huge influx of new materials that often come from a single place. As a result, materials like cellphone, cement, linoleum, nylon, vinyl (and plastic to some extent) have dozens of cognates around the world as do useful chemicals like dynamite, guano, and propane as well as certain ores like bauxite.



Chemical Elements

In a similar vein, words for chemical elements can be native, part of a group of aerial cognates, or global cognates. World for precious metals like gold, silver, copper, tin, and iron tend to be old and part of a language's native vocabulary. On the other end of the spectrum, chemical terminology and chemical elements are fairly new concepts. So while the substances may have been known for centuries, certain names for chemical elements were identified relatively recently like cobalt (1735), calcium (1800s), titanium (1791), and nickel (1751).



Global cognates can also be found in elements that weren’t known to most societies and were recently discovered or identified. This includes elements like neon (1898), iodine (1811), helium (1868) and lithium (1817).



A large number of the overall elements on the Periodic Table are also cognates across most languages. However, since most people don’t regularly talk about or interact with elements like protactinium, plutonium, or berkelium, these kinds of words are quite limited in their use and are mostly unused by most speakers of any given language.

Medicine and Medical Chemicals

There’s a smaller number of words related to medicine and health that have cognates across most languages. Some of these are the names of specific diseases, viruses, and ailments. Writing this in 2024, the terms corona and covid are now firmly planted as international cognates. The word virus itself is something of an international cognate as well. The same can be said for biochemical terms like steroid, dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline.


Interestingly, one can find cognates to the word penicillin in a lot of places. The name itself comes from part of the translingual lexicon of science as it’s named after a fungus then-called penicillium notatum.



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