> We should respect the name which the discoverer gave to it.
Why?
I have a feeling if Americans said "aluminium" and Brits said "aluminum", you wouldn't be saying this. I see no reason why the discoverer's naming deserves any special status.
> I see no reason why the discoverer's naming deserves any special status.
At its most basic, this is one of the main currencies of science. Remember what happened with apatosaurus / brontosaurus?
This is a practice that most people will agree without persuasion is "fair", that certain people care about a great deal, and that costs society nothing. What's wrong with it?
As a mark of respect, I agree. However languages don't work that way. I've changed my stance over the years to whatever works in the name of communication. Language is fluid so our attitude needs to be fluid too.
There is no real discoverer. Its like crediting Columbus with discovering America? Or Al Gore with inventing the internet?
Wolfram story is probably a decent analogy. Some Swede described an ore in a book and named it after himself, then a sample of his ore that was contaminated with wolframite (named by german Agricola, yes, by that famous Agricola) had an acid extraction run on it, that resulted in what we'd now call impure raw tungstic acid. A lot of people thought that acid was pretty interesting but it took some Spanish dudes to reduce the acid to a completely worthless metal. Then two centuries later one American dude came up with a way of purification and heat treatment such that it finally made a decent wire for electric light bulb (no, not the guy you're thinking of, a plant scale engineer decades after the inventor) and then General Electric (at that time an American company unlike now) tried to patent the whole process. Such that in the 1920s, or whatever it was, you'd have a chemical element where its only industrial production was patented, which sounds crazy in 2013 but wasn't all that unusual about a century ago. And that patent got overturned if I recall correctly (no I'm not that old, just from memory)
The point of this ramble about Schelium metal lightbulbs is given some research there IS NO DISCOVERER. Other than the victor writes the histories and such, which is trivially interesting from a sociological perspective but has no actual hard science meaning.
