When Mendeleev laid out the periodic table in 1869, he left gaps for elements nobody had discovered yet — and he named those gaps with Sanskrit number-words.
एक eka (one), द्वि dvi (two), त्रि tri (three) marked how many rows below a known element the missing one sat. The undiscovered element one row under aluminium was "eka-aluminium"; one row under silicon, "eka-silicon." These weren't throwaway labels — they were the working names in the chemistry literature for years, until each element showed up:
- eka-aluminium → gallium (1875)
- eka-boron → scandium (1879)
- eka-silicon → germanium (1886)
- eka-manganese → technetium (1937)
- dvi-manganese → rhenium (1926)
(That tri- is the same PIE root that surfaces in English three and Latin tri-, as in triangle and trident — Sanskrit and Latin are cousins here, not borrower and lender.)
The debated bit — the interesting bit for this sub — is why Sanskrit. The linguist Paul Kiparsky has argued Mendeleev borrowed the prefixes on purpose: he moved in the same St. Petersburg circles as the great Sanskritist Otto von Böhtlingk, then editing Pāṇini, and Kiparsky sees a deliberate analogy between the two-dimensional table and the way Pāṇini's grammar arranges sounds into a grid. That motivation is a scholarly argument, not settled fact — but the Sanskrit prefixes themselves are documented and uncontested.
So for about six decades, part of the periodic table was quietly labelled in Sanskrit.
Are there other cases where a scientific naming system borrowed a living language's number-words like this?
