FROM “MINERALOGICAL DICTIONARY” TO “UKRAINIAN NOMENCLATURE OF MINERALS”

Abstract

“Mineralogical Dictionary”, written by Ye. Lazarenko and O. Vynar (1975), was the first to publish in Ukrainian all the names of minerals known at that time: approved, obsolete, synonyms, names of varieties. It was also an explanatory dictionary, since it contained the most important information about the mineral – from the chemical composition and physical properties to the distribution and etymology of the name. The dictionary also contains explanations of several thousand rare, forgotten and underused mineralogical terms that can be found in the ancient geological literature. Such a collection is valuable both historically and scientifically. After the number of mineral species exceeded one thousand, and the number of their names – ten times more, in 1959 mineralogists created the International Mineralogical Association (IMA), under which two commissions were set up to control the regulation of the nomenclature of minerals and the approval of new mineral species. In 2006, Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (СNМNС) was set up. The Ukrainian Mineralogical Society (UMS) became a member of the IMA in 1994. Most mineralogical terms, used by Ukrainian mineralogists, were borrowed from Russian, although a number of ancient Ukrainian words have been preserved as normative historical names of minerals. Some of the terms, in particular the names of recently discovered minerals were borrowed directly from other languages according to the rules of transcription and written in accordance with the current Ukrainian spelling. They often did not coincide with those transcribed from Russian. This led to the emergence of a variety of terms for one species with a one– two letters difference. The urgent need for Ukrainian scientific terminology led to the emergence after 1991 of a series of geological and mineralogical dictionaries – of different specialization, content, distribution and quality. All of these dictionaries are a thing of the past, refining existing terms in their own way, and none of them cover new mineral species that are constantly appearing in Englishlanguage scientific literature. But a particular mineral species must have one name, regardless of whether it is formed by transliteration or transcription and how exactly it corresponds to the historical name or the name proposed by the author of the discovery. The Terminological Commission, established in 2017 at the UMS was given a task of arranging the nomenclature of minerals. According to Acad. Ye. Lazarenko, nomenclature is the language of mineralogists. The Commission approved the main principles of Ukrainian mineral names formation and spelling. Prepared for publication in accordance with the decisions of the Terminology Commission the “Ukrainian Nomenclature of Minerals” monograph, which contains information on 5 780 mineral species known as of 2021, should help Ukrainian mineralogists speak the same language.