Level 8 "aluminium" should be looked at I think. - Feed Post from MintyHippo to beeant
Level 8 "aluminium" should be looked at I think.
posted by MintyHippo
Comments 17
"Aluminium" is the preferred UK English spelling, I believe.- beeantさんへ。
The preferred US English spelling is "aluminum", if you want to include both. (You've done this with some other vocabulary items, such as "review" and "revise".) 
aluminum in Canada too.
and thank you so much japaneseclass.jp for another level!!! :))
The correct spelling is aluminium. Do you guys pronounce it the way Americans do? Hopefully Australia and Canada haven't really ended up with the wrong spelling too.- No, "aluminium" is the British spelling. Look at the screenshot of the dictionary I just posted.
- mog86ukさんへ。
If you look up the history of the pronunciation of the word, you will find that "aluminum" preceded "aluminium" by a few years, and that neither were the original name. Given this, insisting that "aluminium" is "the correct spelling" is a bit perverse. "Aluminium" is correct in the UK and preferred in some scientific journals in the US; "aluminum" is almost universal in ordinary usage in the US; I don't know about Canada.
"The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy.Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in –ium, like potassium, sodium, andmagnesium, all of which had been named by Davy." - Are you one of those people who insists that "colour" is the correct spelling of the word which is usually spelled that way in the UK, and usually spelled "color" in the US? I'm sorry, I have no sympathy with that attitude. (By the way, I prefer the spelling "theatre" to the spelling "theater".)
- Otsukare. Arigatou fuonk :)
- Well given that "aluminium" was the spelling that they settled on in 1812 (he switched to "aluminum" before this as you said, but apparently it was in the same year 1812), then wouldn't this be the correct way of spelling the name of the metal in English?
Just because it got listed differently in an American dictionary a decade later before fixing it to "aluminium" in a different edition a few decades later--and just because, half a century after the metal was named, a famous American chemist made a big typo where he spelt the word differently to his own patents--and then eventually "aluminum" switched to becoming the common spelling in America. I don't see how these things would have any affect on the spelling and pronunciation used by other English speaking countries.
It also appears that the IUPAC decided on "aluminium" as the international standard spelling of the metal too. So I didn't expect this "aluminum" spelling to have spread outside the US for these reasons.
The pronunciation "a-loo-min-num" seems like a very American sounding thing to me too, so I will be surprised to learn that people in the other countries pronounce it that way. But it sounds like they really do. o.O - However each country has decided it should be spelt now for their country, that is what the correct spelling should be for English in that country. What I meant about misspelling was simply the historical switching away from aluminium as the original preferred spelling, not what each individual person is spelling it as. ^^
It has been aluminium for me since I was a child. I've been liking the element Aluminium so I can remember. It's also written as Aluminium on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium
So to be fair, is it better to put both aluminium, and aluminum?- It's been color rather than colour for me though.
- I'd say it would be fair to put both spellings for aluminum/aluminium and color/colour. Thanks for your work.
- Some US English speakers will not be familiar with the spelling and pronunciation "aluminium", so for that reason, I would recommend giving both spellings. In the case of words such as color/colour, favor/favour, center/centre and theater/theatre, I don't think it matters; any native English speaker will recognize both. In the case of review/revise, I think it was important that you gave both.
I don't think it's a "fairness" issue; you're providing a learning resource, so you want to avoid anything which might confuse students. - @telezkope, @fuonk
I just added both aluminium, and aluminum. You're welcome! Thanks for using JCJP! 
Both spellings should be available, and I don't get the argument that one is "correct" and the other is "incorrect", when dealing with English speaking countries. I will argue the Japanese term "energish" to my dying breath, but aluminum, aluminium, either is fine.
I know it's been fixed already but just for sake of clarity I wasn't talking about the spelling of the word but rather how the question was the answer itself.
I'm used to spelling being "Americanized" on the internet so spelling one one or another doesn't bother me ^^