User blog comment:Ravyn Uvenim13/Transparent Glass Armor & Weapon mods, Why?/@comment-24590102-20140403021100

I can really relate to this: Add to this the concept of steel from iron and corundum, instead of iron and charcoal with no zinc, chromium or molybdenum etc. and, well, maybe it's just a little oversimplified.
 * Corundum: Aluminium Oxide – AKA Sapphire glass – lovely ceramic material which smelts to aluminium with very large power expenditure
 * Moonstone: Feldspar, smelts to slag
 * Malachite: Copper carbonate – very soft ornamental stone which smelts to copper
 * Quicksilver: AKA Mercury – liquid at room temperature

Then it dawned on me that many of these words can't, and thus don't, mean the same thing in the TES world as they do in the real world. This is surprisingly realistic, if a bit exaggerated. Many of the words that the English language shares with other languages mean something completely different in English to the meaning carried by the same word in the other language (e.g. “memoir”; a written personal/informal recollection in English cw the post-doctoral thesis or period equivalent thereof in French). And, of course, there is always the issue of dialect which tends to display the wildest variations in the naming of minerals and gems in particular - and, based on comparing translations of the Old Testament, it would seem that one culture's jasper is another culture's diamond! :^)

As for the refinement of opaque minerals – opacity is a tricky one. Compare pyrite and milky quartz for example. Pyrite remains opaque -even in thin section- no matter how thin you grind it. Milky quartz, on the other hand, is opaque in hand specimen but transparent in thin section. Who knows, maybe we have a whole new technical definition for the word “translucent” right here? Milky quartz can be used to make good quality glass if the purity of the quartz is high enough.

So there is a little complication, here, in that there are some materials which, due to aggregation or microfracturing, can be superficially opaque (e.g. limestone) but, with the right process (e.g. recrystallisation, annealing, cracking and refining, etc) can be made transparent (e.g. calcite).