»In which unique is where you find it.

In a volume of Isaac Asimov's collected stories, "The Edge of Tomorrow", one of the most enjoyable stories is "Unique is Where You Find It", about a neurotic graduate student and his obstinate advisor, and their discussion of the naming of elements. I came across a reference to an element called "ekamanganese"; this aroused my curiosity, as the parts of the name looked familiar, yet I was certain that no element exists with this same name. A look across the Internet produced a citation to a note that presents reasons why Mendeleev chose now-superseded Sanskrit names for eight elements in the periodic table. The Russian scholar Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table of the elements, a masterpiece of instructional design and a wonder in its many aspects, and also predicted the composition of many elements not yet discovered in his day.

The syllable eka comes from the Sanskrit word meaning "one"; it appears as an element in many Sanskrit words. No pun intended. Time Magazine noted in 1930 that "Eka, Sanskrit for one or first, is a prefix applied to the first undiscovered element in a group of the periodic system."

The connections between classical Sanskrit poetry and Mendeleev's periodic table strike me as sublime. The author of the note above reaches the conclusion that "... Mendeleev, by using Sanskrit names, was tipping his hat to the Sanskrit grammarians of yore, who had created astonishingly sophisticated theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds." One of the more interesting passages in the note come from "private communication" between the author and the linguist (ha, there's another fine Sanskrit word for you) Paul Kiparsky: who found "striking similarities between the Periodic Table and the introductory Śiva Sūtras in [5th-century grammarian] Panini’s grammar ...".

The Asimov story uses the faithful mechanism of "The butler did it" (sort of) to wrap up its narrative, but the exposition contains a succinct discussion, courtesy of Asimov's Black Widowers Club, of almost all the elements and the composition of their names.