Talk:qingheiite

Absurd Pronunciation

@Metaknowledge Hey-I have just started working on the geography of Qinggil/Qinghe County in Xinjiang/East Turkistan, and the pronunciation provided by R:WebMineral on this page is beyond absurd- it should sound like "ching huuh ite" (青河 (Qīnghé) ite /t͡ɕʰiŋ⁵⁵//xɤ³⁵/ite) but instead it sounds like "queen hee ite [1]". I'm a Wikipedian, not a mineralogist, but I think that mineralogy could not possibly have a real pronunciation standard that would diverge from the original Mandarin Chinese pronunciation this much. Is there anything I can do to prevent this absurd pronunciation from becoming an English language standard? Should I write them? What should Wiktionary do? Thanks. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 10:27, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge (potentially more solvable question / follow-up in case you were not interested in the first message) The etymology section says this is a combination of Qinghe and -ite, but why is there another "i" in the middle? I assume that it is there because Qinghe ends with an 'e' (vowel) and they don't want people saying "Qingheite" as two syllables in English ('queen height'). I think it would be appropriate to add some explanation for this extra i, or a link to a Wiktionary page about the creation of mineral names in the etymology section. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:34, 18 November 2020 (UTC) (modified)

I can't explain either of those. I've never heard of this very rare mineral, and there is no pronunciation standard for something so obscure, but I would expect that most anglophone mineralogists would produce something similar to that audio file. There is nothing we can or should do to prevent it. The extra i is ill-formed, as you say, but is probably an error on the part of the Chinese mineralogists who named it, and likely has no explanation beyond that. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:48, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

I don't know Chinese but is "Qinghei" an alternate transliteration of the place name? I can see some search hits. That would explain the i. Equinox ◑ 06:05, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

@Equinox, Metaknowledge (1) So you two have never seen a mineral where the suffix "-ite" forced the adding of an additional "i" between the initial part of the mineral name and the suffix? (2) If the usage of the name of this mineral were very rare in practice, then it stands to reason that the pronunciation audio file is just a mistake or just a guess. I have corrected dictionaries in the past, so I do feel like there is a "should" there. (3) Based on a few days of looking at materials about this county, it seems absolutely impossible that Qinghe could be written as Qinghei or that Qinghei is another name for Qinghe. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 13:01, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

We could argue uselessly all month about this. Let's contact a mineralogist. Does anybody know one? If not then send me e-mail and I will deal with it. Equinox ◑ 07:35, 2 December 2020 (UTC)