This language enthusiast reimagined the periodic table in Filipino

Arriane Grace Villasana

The periodic table usually greets students as a wall of symbols, numbers, and unfamiliar names. But imagine encountering it in a language that already feels like your own. 

Imagine hydrogen, oxygen, and gold carrying not just sound, but story.

That’s exactly what Michael Silerio, a Filipino language enthusiast, set out to explore. Over two months, he created a Filipino translation of the Periodic Table that goes beyond renaming symbols. His project explains atomic structure, electron configuration, chemical bonds, and periodic trends entirely in Filipino, turning science into something that feels closer to home.

Meet the translator of possibility

Meet Michael Silerio, a graduate of AB History in the University of the Philippines—Diliman.

“I do a lot of things, mostly writing history articles, but my biggest hobby is making history-related charts, like timelines and genealogies.”

Before turning to chemistry, Silerio had already built an online following through visual history projects that went viral, including the “Philippine History Iceberg,” “Evolution of the Baybayin Script,” and a “Timeline of Southeast Asian Political History.” His work was even featured by Canadian chartmaker Matt Baker on the YouTube channel UsefulCharts as one of the Best Fan-Made Charts of 2025.

“This is actually my first time creating a science-related chart,” Silerio adds. “I also recently made my first philosophy-related chart called ‘The Problem of Evil Summarized.’”

While he is not a chemistry major, Silerio is clear about what his work is and what it is not. He does not present his translations as scientific standards. Instead, he frames the project as an exercise in imagination, a way of exploring what learning might look like if complex ideas were taught in the language students already live in.

He calls it “isang alternatibong pagbábaka-sakali sa wikang Filipino,” a way of testing how far Filipino can go in carrying scientific meaning.

Where language meets science 

Silerio traces the roots of the project back to his college days and a class that reshaped how he thought about language.

“I had a Filipino 40 professor who really opened my eyes to the importance of intellectualizing the Filipino language,” he says. “Although we vary on how exactly we would do it (and plenty of academicians disagree with each other about this), I knew by then that I had to do my part on promoting the intellectualization of the Filipino language.”

Originally, he imagined doing this through history. “Personally, I want to do that by teaching history to my future students, and contributing to knowledge production in my field using Filipino,” he says.

What ultimately led him to science was a decades-old reference work. “What ultimately made me decide to create the chart is when I encountered Gonsalo del Rosario’s ‘Maúgnaying Talásalitaang Pang-aghám: Inglés-Filipino’ that was published by Linangan sa Wikang Pilipino (now Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino) in 1969,” he says.

“Though it’s quite old and probably outdated by now, I thought it would be a pretty good place to start. After all, languages always evolve over time and we modify them to keep up with the times.”

A Filipino spin on chemistry

Silerio is upfront about stepping into unfamiliar territory. “To tell you the truth, I am not an expert on chemistry in any way. I am not even a STEM major,” he says. “That’s why I needed the help of my friends who know more about this subject than I do, and I did my best to be as scientifically accurate as possible.”

Still, the idea behind the project had been with him for years. “But I always dreamed of a Philippines that teaches STEM using our own national language,” he explains. “I thought before, if only I learned about science and math in my elementary and high school days using the language that I grew up speaking, perhaps I would understand the lessons better.”

Rather than simply “Filipinizing” English terms, Silerio traced the original meanings of the elements, which are often rooted in Greek, Latin, and older Asian languages, and rebuilt them using Filipino words with the same sense.

Hydrogen becomes Danúmlikhâ, from danúm (water) and likhâ (to create), echoing the Greek idea of “water-former.” Oxygen becomes Asámlikhâ, from asám (sour or acid) and likhâ, reflecting its historical link to acidity.

Some elements retain native Philippine terms, such as Tansô for copper and Gintò for gold. Others draw from historical borrowings in Malay, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian, like Tingkálon for boron, from tingkal, borax, and Sósa for sodium, from Spanish sosa.

For elements named after people or places, Silerio adapts the spellings into Filipino phonology, resulting in names such as Ítriyo (Yttrium), Kalipórnyo (Californium), and Kopérnisyo (Copernicium).

How the words were chosen

His process followed a clear hierarchy.

“I first asked, do we have a native term for this element,” he explains. “That applies to gold, silver, copper, lead, and even arsenic and sulfur.”

He explains that some of these terms already existed in Philippine languages. “I learned from Rio Alma’s UP Diksyonaryong Filipino that arsenic is ‘basikut’ in old Ilokano and ‘sangyawa’ in old Tagalog, since we are used to using their Spanish names.”

From there, he turned to regional roots. “If the element doesn’t have an equivalent native term, I use the next best thing, Malay. Because linguistically it’s closer to Philippine languages.” 

If neither existed, he returned to etymology. “Some Greek and Latin roots can actually be translated into Filipino,” he says, pointing again to hydrogen as an example. “Hydrogen was coined by French chemist Antoine Lavoisier in 1783 from Greek ‘ὕδωρ γείνομαι’ which literally means ‘I create water.’ That’s why I translated hydrogen as ‘danumlikha.’”

He notes that not every term lent itself easily to this approach. “However, there are some elements with Greek etymologies that I deemed too awkward and unpleasantly sounding to literally translate into Filipino, like argon, xenon, fluorine, chlorine, praseodymium, neodymium, etc. So I just Filipinized their current English names.”

To avoid confusion, he included a guide to the chart itself. “In order for the public to not be confused with my translation choices, I put a table on the chart where I explained the etymology of the elements. And I didn’t change their chemical symbols.”

For him, disagreement is part of the process. “People may disagree with me, and maybe they can create their own translations better than mine. For me, that’s the beauty of academic discourse. We can all do our own part to contribute to intellectualizing our own language.

Science in the language of home

What sets the project apart is not just the poetry of its names, but the depth of its science. The table includes Filipino explanations of atomic structure, múlasik (proton), dagisik (electron), awansik (neutron), and butód (nucleus), along with detailed discussions of electron configuration, periodic trends, and chemical behavior.

It even traces the history of atomic models, from John Dalton’s early solid-sphere concept to Schrödinger’s quantum model, showing how humanity’s understanding of the atom has evolved over time.

“I did that to see what it would look like to explain scientific terms using Del Rosario’s book, since I have never encountered any science textbook before that used his Filipino translation suggestions,” Silerio says.

A table grounded in global science

Silerio began the project last December and spent nearly two months completing it.

“I had to fact-check everything,” he says. “I even bought a chart of the latest version of the Periodic Table. I didn’t tackle advanced chemistry, only the topics we covered in high school before.”

While the language is local, the data is global. Silerio made sure that the scientific values and classifications in his table follow the standards of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), ensuring that accuracy is preserved even as the language shifts.

Why this is a “What-if” project 

Silerio is careful about how his work is received.“I said that this is a what-if scenario since I am aware how some people in the academe might be sensitive about this stuff,” Silerio says. “That perhaps it would come off as something that I would like to impose on our education system.”

“I did that to emphasize that I am not an authoritative figure on the intellectualization of the Filipino language nor an expert on chemistry. I’m just a guy that wants to try.”

He sees the chart as an invitation, not a conclusion. “This is where Zeus Salazar’s notion of ‘talastasang bayan’ would come to mind,” he says. “I want to contribute to that national conversation, where we can negotiate on how we would enrich our national language not just in our everyday life, but also in the academe.”

The bigger picture behind the table

For Silerio, language is deeply tied to how students learn. “I am an advocate of Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education,” he says. “I believe we can better understand complex subjects if we teach them first using the language most of our children grew up learning.”

“And then, after we have a basic understanding, we can proceed to learning them in English.”

The process changed him as much as the chart itself. “In my experience attempting to translate the Periodic Table in Filipino, I actually understood chemistry better,” he says.

Looking beyond the classroom, he sees broader implications.

“I believe it would improve the state of science and technology in our country, since we would understand science in our own language and would use that knowledge to respond to our local needs,” he says. 

“But of course, it would take more than that. That includes more funding on our scientific research and technological projects from the government, and investing more in our local scientists so that they would be more compelled to use their knowledge in the service of our nation.”

At the heart of it all, he returns to language. “Overall, I believe that these would greatly improve our own understanding of the subjects, and that way, we would produce more scientists and inventors that would contribute to our nation-building, and for me, the first step to that is to take the intellectualization of the Filipino language more seriously.”

If Filipinos can explain love, history, and poetry in their own language, why not atoms and elements too?

By letting science speak Filipino, his periodic table offers a picture of classrooms where students do not just memorize symbols, but encounter science in words that feel like their own. 

Sometimes, all it takes to bring science closer is to let it speak our language.