Ebook: English-Esperanto Chemical Dictionary (Angla-Esperanta kemia vortaro)

Publisher: British Esperanto Association
Publication date: 1956
Number of pages: 54Whilst a number of vocabularies and other books have been published dealing with chemical terminology in Esperanto,* none of these is in the form of an English-Esperanto vocabulary. The words are arranged either according to a necessarily ill-defined subject order or according to their alphabetical order in Esperanto or some other language. The English-speaking Esperantist needs a dictionary with the terms arranged according to the alphabetical order of the English words and this book is designed
to fill that need.
An attempt has been made to include as many terms as practicable relating to theoretical and laboratory chemistry, to deal with general industrial chemistry without going into minute details relating to particular industries rather than to chemistry proper, and to give the more important chemical words used in related subjects such as mineralogy, crystallography, pharmacy and biochemistry.
Archaic terms have been included for the benefit of foreign Esperantists using this dictionary to help them to read works containing such words, and alternative spellings have also been included to assist them.
Since there are over 600,000 individual named substances known to chemists, it is clearly impossible to include them all in any dictionary, but the following notes may assist in deriving the correct Esperanto names for those not given.
(1) Most complex chemical names are made by combining short prefixes, roots, suffixes and terminations together, in a manner familiar to all chemists. Thus the name cyclopentadiene is made up of the word-elements cyclo-, penta-, di- and -ene, which may be looked up separately in the dictionary and the translations found combined to give the Esperanto word, ciklopentadieno.
(2) In other cases where the word cannot be split up in this way, the names of compounds can often be deduced by analogy with those given. Notes relating to the form of whole classes of Esperanto words will be found in appropriate places in the body of the dictionary (see, e.g., the notes following the entries agent, amylopectin, aurous . . .)
(3) Nearly all scientific terms are very international and are similar in form in English and Esperanto apart from differences in spelling and grammatical endings. The latter present no difficulty in view of the perfect regularity of the Esperanto grammar. The differences in spelling are systematic, so that the correct Esperanto spelling can usually be deduced from the English word by the regular system of substitution set out in the next paragraph.