New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

I have noticed, when talking minerals with friends/colleagues/dealers, that they are often unsure about the pronunciation of some mineral names. This doubt is usually manifested when they give two (or more) pronunciations for the mineral every time they use the name. This was recently brought home to me in regard to uranocircite. ("Hey, Paul. Have you seen the new you-ran-oh-sir-sites/youran-oh-sir-kites coming out of Brazil?") Note that many of these people are highly regarded scientists and professionals who are otherwise quite sophisticated about minerals. They can tell you all about the chemistry, mineral associations, and phase relationships but they are unsure about the pronuncia¬tion of the very thing they are talking about. This problem may be partly related to the lack of pronunciation guides in mineral texts, guidebooks, glossaries, and the like. And I have seldom seen pronunciations given in the primary and secondary articles that describe new mineral species!

What is needed to rectify this situation is for someone to search out correct pronunciations and take it upon himself to inform everyone else. And this is just what I have attempted to do in this paper (at considerable risk to my health and any good graces that I might have with friends and colleagues). In some small way I hope that many of you will pick up the right pronunciations of some beleaguered minerals and pass them on to others. Then you too can be regarded as know-it-alls.

The only major work that I know of which attempts to list and discuss the proper pronuncia-tion(s) of most mineral names if the "Chemical Index of Minerals" (and supplements) by Max Hey of the British Museum. For more than a few years, I have been looking up problematical mineral pronunciations in these references so I could at least be correct myself. I have also tried to pass some of this information on to some of my more receptive comrades. Now it is perhaps time for me to expand on my mission of education and speak to wider audiences. In preparation for this mission, I have gone through various mineral lists picking out those names which seem to be forever giving people problems, e.g. tyuyumunite, goethite, fuchsite, and phenacite. In the process I found some names that people didn't realize they had problems with, e.g. parisite, escloizite, coesite, and cuprite. I also found a number of interesting homonymous names, e.g. allanite-alunite and beyerite-byerite or beyerite-bayerite. Some minerals are (almost) never pronounced correctly, e.g. biotite, gadolinite, and descloisite. And the plethora of relatively new names from around the globe continues to plague my efforts because they are not yet in my main reference, e.g. cechite, ktenasite, and dzhezkazganite. As I close this paper, I should mention that neither of the uranocircite pronunciations listed above is correct.

References:

1. Hey, Max, "Chemical Index of Minerals", 2nd ed. and Appendices, British Museum (Natural History), London. Nickel, Earnest H., and Nichols, Monte C., "Mineral Reference Manual", Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1991.