Tell me about Uranus

[Sapo]

more specifically, the pronounciation of the word.

I just realized that for all I have read about Astronomy, I had never heard the word said aloud in english. I always thought it was said as "your anus" which made the juvenile jokes about Mr. Spock and toilet paper make sense. But today I was stuck at home watching the Science Channel and in about 4 shows, they always said it "U-rah-noos" or "OO-rah-noos". What gives? Which is it? Has it changed recently? If it was never "Your anus" why the jokes?

[Jodi]

AFAIK it was always pronounced "yer anus" until people got all giggly about that, and then some people changed the pronunciation to "YOO-rah-nus" to avoid having to say "yer anus." BFD, says I.

[Shagnasty]

Your Anus is the pronunciation I always knew. Was it British people that were pronouncing it differently. They just do that sometimes (Proof: aluminium instead of aluminum because it suits their style better.)

[Polycarp]

The Greek is Ouranos; the name was given at a time when Latinate adaptations of Greek names were SOP in cultured circles. OO-rahn-ohs would have been proper for the unadapted Greek. However, don't forget that Englishmen adapted foreign names -- the capital of France in English is Paris, rhyming with Harris, not Paree with a glottal R. "Mother's bovine" (Moscow) rather than MAWSK-vah for Moskva. Florence for Firenze, Leghorn for Livorno, etc.

So traditional English was Uranus, pronounced with a long A to match your anus. More properly it should have been you-RAH-nus and that was a minority pronunciation. But it got the palatalized initial English U, much like Ulysses (whose name never began with a YOU until it crossed the English Channel). Pedants will tell you to put the accent on the first syllable, but that only alters the pun, as it then is a homophone for "urinous" (redolent of urine).

Maybe Herschel was right and we should have stuck with "George."

[Sapo]

The shows were narrated in American english. If they are changing it now to avoid the gigglishness, that's lame.

[Barrington]

Here in Britain, it was just as Jodi said.

[Squink]

Originally Posted by Jodi

AFAIK it was always pronounced "yer anus" until people got all giggly about that

IIRC, Dan Rather pronounced it funny on the evening news back in the early 80's.

[Fear Itself]

Yer-anus or Urine-us, either way the fourth graders are gonna giggle.

[Duckster]

Let us begin this section by saying we don't want to hear any snickering. The correct way to pronounce Uranus is with an emphasis on the "Ur." There is very little emphasis on the "a" syllable. You may now return to the discussion.

Source: http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/kids/sc...tem/Uranus.htm

There are two canonical pronunciations:

1) You Rain Us or Your Anus

2) Urine Us

Generally, if I am giving a public talk to young people and teenagers, I use the scatological pronunciation. If I am giving a talk to an older audience, I opt for the more conservative 'Urine-Us' pronunciation. When talking to other professional astronomers, or when I overhear them talking to themselves, I hear both forms being used.

Source: http://www.tas.idv.tw/faq/q427.html

so what is the proper way to pronounce Uranus. “YourAnus” (with accent on the second syllable and a hard ‘a’ or “Yuriness” (with the accent on the first syllable and a softer ‘a’)?

-- snip --

I remember, many years ago, when Carl Sagan made one of his memorable appearances on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson brought up the pronounciation of Uranus. It was at the time when the Voyager missions were beginning to make their first flybys of the outer planets and there was a lot of media attention being given to space science.

Sagan, in his usual jovial and tongue-in-cheek style, admitted that the planet had been called “Your Anus” since its discovery; but now that there was so much mention of it on TV and radio, NASA officials had decided to try to stop the onslaught of predictable jokes by changing the pronounciation to “Urine-ess.”

-- snip --

You can hear the pronounciation on an audio file here at the Nine Planets website:
http://www.nineplanets.org/uranus.html

Source: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2...around-uranus/



<<Inserts obligatory Star Trek comment about Klingons when discussing Uranus.>>

[kunilou]

Re: Carl Sagan

The first time I noticed that someone had changed the pronunciation was when Sagan did his Cosmos series on PBS. He pronounced it, approximately, "Oor-uh-nus."

For those who don't remember, that was the program that gave birth to the phrase "BILLyuns and BILLyuns."

[cmkeller]

You didn't hear? They changed the name because everyone was sick of that stupid joke. It's now called Urectum.

[CalMeacham]

National Lampoon once ran one of their fake letters complaining that none of the pronunciations was acceptable -- "Your Anus" or "Urine Us' or "You're in Us".


As I've said before on this Board, I think any of these are more acceptable than its original name --- "George".


That's right. William Herschel, who discovered it, the first major planet to be found ince the days of antiquity, decided to use the occasion to brown-nose for royal favor by naming after Britain's King George, suggestimg it be called "Georgium Sideris" Talk anbout Your Anus. The name was used for a while, too, although some people, wanting to give the discoverer credit, called it "Herschel". Finally, folks decided to follow the pattern of the other planets, and name it after a Graeco-Roman deity, a practice they continued to follow with Neptune and Pluto and lors of other bodies until they ran out of Graeco-Roman names, at which point they started delving into other mythologies.

[Dr. Rieux]

Originally Posted by cmkeller

You didn't hear? They changed the name because everyone was sick of that stupid joke. It's now called Urectum.

Thank you, Professor Farnsworth.

[Johanna]

The Sanskrit godname cognate of Greek Ουρανος is Varuṇa वरुण whose name is translated 'All-Enveloping Sky'. It's easy to pronounce. It affords no giggles even to 3rd-graders (or the developmental equivalent thereof). We should rename the planet Varuna. Many years ago, Arthur C. Clarke promised in Rendezvous with Rama that we would get some Hindu godnames for planets eventually. Well?

[Q.E.D.]

Originally Posted by cmkeller

You didn't hear? They changed the name because everyone was sick of that stupid joke. It's now called Urectum.

Urectum? U damn near killed 'um!

[wolf_meister]

Isaac Asimov always had an aversion to this name. He thought with the scarcity of planets couldn't they think of a better name?

Asimov said even if you avoided the "Your Anus" pronunciation, you still have a pretty unpleasant connotation with the urinous pronunciation.

(Isaac Asimov also had a complaint about naming many of those rare earth elements after the obscure Scandinavian locations where they were discovered).

[Terminus Est]

Originally Posted by Johanna

The Sanskrit godname cognate of Greek Ουρανος is Varuṇa वरुण whose name is translated 'All-Enveloping Sky'. It's easy to pronounce. It affords no giggles even to 3rd-graders (or the developmental equivalent thereof). We should rename the planet Varuna. Many years ago, Arthur C. Clarke promised in Rendezvous with Rama that we would get some Hindu godnames for planets eventually. Well?

Varuna is already the name of an object in the Kuiper Belt. I don't know offhand whether any other planetary objects are named after Hindu deities.

[si_blakely]

Originally Posted by wolf_meister

Asimov said even if you avoided the "Your Anus" pronunciation, you still have a pretty unpleasant connotation with the urinous pronunciation.

Thats just taking the p...

Si

[Malacandra]

Originally Posted by Polycarp

"Mother's bovine" (Moscow) rather than MAWSK-vah for Moskva.

MOSS-co is more common than "Ma's Cow" over here. In an English accent, no-one could mistake "moss" for "ma's".

[Flipshod]

Originally Posted by kunilou

For those who don't remember, that was the program that gave birth to the phrase "BILLyuns and BILLyuns."

Except Mr. Sagan (R.I.P.) said in his last book that he never said "billions AND billions" in Cosmos--he just emphasized "billions" so much that the phrase made itself up and got stuck. (After all, why say the former when the latter means the same thing.)

[CalMeacham]

Except Mr. Sagan (R.I.P.) said in his last book that he never said "billions AND billions" in Cosmos--he just emphasized "billions" so much that the phrase made itself up and got stuck. (After all, why say the former when the latter means the same thing.)

Except that the phrase "Bill-yuns and Bill-yuns" is fondly recalled by many people. I suspect it's one of those things that comedians and initators used as a sort of shorthand for Sagan, so that the phrase got associated with him, despite his not saying it (just like "Play it Again, Sam" got associated with Bogie in Casablanca).

When I first met Pepper Mill, she and her friends had come up with a unit they called the 'Sagan"


One Sagan = Billions and Billions

[Johanna]

Originally Posted by Terminus Est

Varuna is already the name of an object in the Kuiper Belt. I don't know offhand whether any other planetary objects are named after Hindu deities.

My gosh, that sounds awfully rinkydink to bear a grand name like All-Enveloping Sky. Compared to Earth, it's just a cobblestone.

My hunch is borne out anyway. In the Tamil language, they use a Tamil form of the Sanskrit name Varuna for Uranus. I wonder if Hindi does too. I wasn't able to find outer planet names in Hindi, though.

[Chronos]

When I'm talking about the planets, it's most often to college freshmen, the one group more immature than third-graders. So I usually play it safe and go with the (approximately) Latinized Greek "Ooranoos"

[Johanna]

Years ago, I taught astronomy to an eighth-grade class, and I always used the same pronunciation for Ouranos as Chronos just described. Slipped into Greek just for that one word.

I'm beginning to realize the value of Wikipedia for quick seat of the pants translations of terms that aren't published in conventional dictionaries. Find an article on what you want to translate. Then check the sidebar of the same topic in other languages to see if its equivalent is there.

From the Uranus article, I didn't find it in Hindi but I found these:
Gujarati: યુરેનસ Yurenas. From English.
Kannada: ಯುರೇನಸ್ Yurênas. From English.
Nepali: युरनस Yuranas. From English.
Tamil Vikkipidiya disagrees with the Tamil name வருனன் Varunan used by the Planetary Gazetteer website, and instead calls it யுரேனஸ் Yurênas. Again, from English. Modern Tamilians, given the choice between English and Sanskrit, have a strong preference for English because of a history of resentment of linguistic domination by North Indians.

The English article says Indians call the planet "Aruna," the charioteer of the sun god Surya. This doesn't make any sense. I suspect the name Varuna was misread with the initial V- left off, and then re-interpreted because Aruna is coincidentally a Hindu mythological name too.

[wolf_meister]

If the International Astronomical Union wanted to demote a planet, they should have kept Pluto and demoted Uranus strictly on the basis of its idiotic name.

[Eurograff]

I can't help but think you are being a bit inconsiderate towards Uranus. There are other languages in the world than English, and the planet's name is the same in those. Of course it has the same Greek, or Greco-Roman, origin, and thus is similar to other planets' names. Why should the speakers of other languages care if the fine planet has a name that sounds funny to English speaker? Instead of changing the name, maybe just change the pronunciation. You're good at it already: English word 'Jupiter' certainly sounds nothing like 'Iuppiter' in original Latin. You could, of course, have retained the original pronunciation (for example in Finnish, Uranus is pronounced pretty much like in Latin, with short vowels). Or alter the name a little, like when Saturnus was shortened to Saturn: Uranus would become Uran, just like it already is in Russian ( Уран ), or Urano like in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Another creative way would be to obsolete the word 'you' like was done with 'thou' by inventing a new second person pronoun: few hundred years ago when 'thou' was still in use, stuff like Thyanus or Thianus would likely have been funny to children, but kids speaking today's English wouldn't understand that...

Also, I don't see why the planet's name couldn't be Uranus (or variation of it) in the Indian languages, too. The English giggle-worthy words certainly don't exist there, and it's just as sensible name as other planets' Greco-Roman designations. Besides, while Indian Varuna is a cognate to Greek Uranos, it's still not the same deity. And as said, Uranus is not a mere "English" name, it's common to every European language, albeit the names for outer planets came to India through English. Though, do the various Indian languages tend to use native names for the five planets visible to naked eye, instead of Greek/Latin? If so, it would be logical to invent 'own' names for Uranus and Neptune, at least, and maybe also for the dwarf planets like poor Pluto.

[Malacandra]

Originally Posted by Sapo

more specifically, the pronounciation of the word.

pronunciation.

[TheLoadedDog]

Obligatory link to jpeg of a certain Chinese ship