Can you actually provide any evidence for this?
Are you complaining about the H -> S transformation, or about the loss of the -os ending? Because both are fairly standard in going from Greek to Latin. Consider also the Greek root “hex” and the Latin “sex”, meaning “six”, or the Greek “hemi” and Latin “semi”, “half”.
What Excalibre is getting at is that “transliteration” actually means “going from one script to another”. So converting Greek ήλιος to Roman alphabet “hilios” would be an example of a transliteration.
Do you seriously think I’m not even aware of sound correspondences between Latin and Greek?
I’m complaining about the use of the word “transliteration” for something that is not a transliteration. The two words are cognates, which explains the difference in their sounds. A transliteration is something like representing “说” as “shuo” - it refers to taking text written in one writing system and representing it in another, hopefully without butchering it too much in the process. With the example I just gave, the text is Chinese and a person literate in Chinese who knows pinyin will read both as the same word. What you’ve described is a translation - using the Latin word in place of the Greek word. The words are similar because Latin and Greek are related to one another. But “sol” is not by the remotest stretch of the imagination a transliteration of “helios”.
Celestia lists it as Sol. Does that make it a pretentious planetarium program?
Well you’ll have to take that complaint to the IAU,
since they’re the ones responsible for the naming conventions for all objects in space, and I don’t think you can call them “annoying and pretentious”.
The naming convention for large bodies (planets, moons, etc.) is that they be named after Greek or Roman mythological characters.
Are “earth” and “moon” Greek or Roman mythological characters?
The “(S)sun” our local star,[
](IAU COMMISSION 5 - WG Designations Star name history)At some point in the future (if it isn’t being worked on now) a new set of star charts will be made showing the constellations as seen from the galactic center. Our local star will be placed in a constellation, and given a Greek letter (if Bayer’s system is used, or if not, some other set of numbers & letters), it’s official name, and if the star naming convention is followed an Arabic common name!
The name a galaxy has depends on which book you look in, there are common names, for instance, The Andromeda Galaxy, also known by the catalog numbers M31 (The Messier Catalog) or NGC224 (New General Catalog).
Here’s a List of Common Deep Sky Catalogs
Our galaxy is officially the Milky Way.
CMC fnord
Amateur Astronomer
12.5 Dob with a f5.6 BVC primary
Well you’ll have to take that complaint to the IAU,
since they’re the ones responsible for the naming conventions for all objects in space, and I don’t think you can call them “annoying and pretentious”.
The naming convention for large bodies (planets, moons, etc.) is that they be named after Greek or Roman mythological characters.
Are “earth” and “moon” Greek or Roman mythological characters?
The “(S)sun” our local star,[
](IAU COMMISSION 5 - WG Designations Star name history)At some point in the future (if it isn’t being worked on now) a new set of star charts will be made showing the constellations as seen from the galactic center. Our local star will be placed in a constellation, and given a Greek letter (if Bayer’s system is used, or if not, some other set of numbers & letters), it’s official name, and if the star naming convention is followed an Arabic common name!
The name a galaxy has depends on which book you look in, there are common names, for instance, The Andromeda Galaxy, also known by the catalog numbers M31 (The Messier Catalog) or NGC224 (New General Catalog).
Here’s a List of Common Deep Sky Catalogs
Our galaxy is officially the Milky Way.
CMC fnord
Amateur Astronomer
12.5 Dob with an f5.6 BVC primary
Sure strikes me that way.
crowmanyclouds - I don’t get it. Where does it say that the Sun is called “Sol”, or that the Earth is called “Terra”, or the moon, “Luna”? I didn’t see that in your quote, nor could I find any results for any of those terms on the IAU’s website (except a page indicating that “sol.” is an abbreviation for the adjective “solar”).
Chaim wins the thread, LOL.
acsenray, I looked it up in the Sanskrit dictionary, and found पृथ्वी prthvī is the earth, पृथिवी prthivī is the Earth Goddess. Both forms are derived from पृथु prthu ‘spread out, extended’. The Sanskrit name for the Sun God is सूर्य sūrya.
I can’t find it on their site either, but
[
](http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/rules.html)while this is generally about planetary features I think the same rule will apply to any new solar planets.
If the IAU calls this planet “Earth” and our moon “Moon” they got some explaining to do!
So you’ve interpreted something they’ve said to somehow imply that the names should be “Sol”, “Terra”, and “Luna”. Nevertheless, they still called the thing “the Earth” in the very document you quoted. Besides, naming the things after Roman and Greek deities is a lot more recent than giving a name to the ground or the big glowy thing in the sky, eh?
Linguistically, we treat our home planet and nearest star specially, because they are utterly unique and incomparable in the human experience to other objects, no matter how similar they are objectively. If someday we have frequent jaunts to other stars, our language will probably somehow change to accommodate the changes in society, but it’s awfully premature to make plans for it, as currently it appears to be impossible to travel faster than light. At any rate, it strikes me as rather unlikely that we’ll ever decide to rename our home in accordance with what we’ve named other things just for consistency’s sake. Claiming that human language ought to change to suit some silly consistency when there’s no other reason to do so strikes me as silly. Claiming that human language has changed and that these things really are called “Sol”, “Terra”, and “Luna” is simply false, and the implication that we should all recognize and agree to this arbitrary ruling about our planet’s name is simply presumptuous in the extreme.
This list of Sun names was included in the song “Ritual” by Yes.
Sol
Dhoop
Sun
Ilios
Naytheet
Ah Kin
Saule
Tonatiuh
Qurax
Gunes
Grian
Surje
Ir
Samse
I haven’t identified all these yet. Can anyone help?
Sol - Latin
Dhoop - ‘sunlight’ in Hindi
Sun - English
Ilios - Modern Greek
Naytheet - ?
Ah Kin - Mayan
Saule - Lithuanian
Tonatiuh - Nahuatl
Qurax - ? possibly a misspelling of Uyghur quyash.
Güneş - Turkish
Grian - Gaelic
Surje - a German-looking way to spell Surya (Sanskrit)
Ir - Ancient Ethiopic? The word for sun is er in Ge‘ez.
Samse - apparently a misspelling of ancient Aramaic shamsho.
Correction: The Yes song with the sun words was “The Ancient: Giants under the Sun.”
This whole debate is getting pretty silly, what, with bringing science fiction into it all. Anyway, I perused a bunch of astrophysics abstracts dealing with the object in question, and every single one refers to it as the Sun. Of course, these are English publications. But, not one of them used Sol.
Done and done.
…in fact, the only time “sol” showed up in a search of astronomical and astrophysics abstracts was as an abbreviation for “solar.”
…and done.
Excalibre: I think we’ve gotten way too emotionally involved in this discussion. Here’s my take on it:
Nobody has ever made an official binding ruling on what the proper names for the planet we are living on, its large natural satellite, and the star about which it orbits and which illuminates it, are “named” – every language that uses proper-nound nomenclature will have some “name” for them.
In keeping with longstanding custom for what to do when different languages use different “names” for the same thing, there arose a custom of using the Latin terms as unofficial “names” for those three objects. This was a fairly common usage in science fiction, both good and bad, where there might in everyday conversation be a need to distinguish the third rock from the sun from other terrestrial planets, etc., and was also used in some science popularizations.
I find nothing pretentious in the idea that utilizing the Latin in lieu of an official proper name enables a certain degree of freedom of description not available otherwise. For example, describe to me the sky visible from a hypothetical Earthlike planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A at about 1 AU. You’ll need to make reference to ACA’s half-degree disk in the daytime, the presence of ACB and the extent to which it illuminates the night for half the year, and the fact that the star around which Earth, Jupiter, etc. revolves is visible as a 1st magnitude star in Cassiopeia when not drowned out by ACA or ACB. I personally would see using “sun” to describe ACA and “Sol” to identify that star as completely within the bounds of clear writing.
Thanks for the correction. I actually don’t know much Sanskrit. I was extrapolating from my knowledge of Bengali, in which “Prithibi” means the Earth.
I have gotten grumpy about this thread, since for some reason many people have taken this thread as an opportunity to make counterfactual assertions about things they obviously do not understand. Meanwhile, my own throwaway comment about “bad sci-fi” for some reason has attracted no end of argument, even though it has absolutely no pertinence to the discussion. Many people here seem to unthinkingly accept common practice with science fiction as reflecting reality, which surely indicates erroneous thinking at least. Nevertheless, I came into this thread to point out reality, not argue about science fiction convention.
Many people are making either logical arguments (most of which have not been particularly logical) or simply stating lies in order to “prove” that the Sun is really named “Sol”. Perhaps they were spurred on by my opining that it’s ridiculously pretentious; nevertheless, I am frustrated by having to explain the same facts over and over. This is a simple factual matter. There is no custom in real life of calling the sun “Sol” accept perhaps among pasty-faced teenage boys wearing Spock ears. I don’t think I’ve gotten “too emotionally involved” - I think I’m irritated that many people seem to feel the need to argue things that simply aren’t true, and rather disgusted that so few people actually have any interest in the actual facts at debate in this GQ thread. “Fighting ignorance” indeed.
I would argue with this. Latin was indeed used as a language of scientific intercourse within western Europe for hundreds of years. However, it is not used for that purpose any more. Latin (well, something resembling Latin) is used now as a tool to name biological organisms, but the problem has nothing to do with language barriers: the purpose of Latin names for species is to identify them unambiguously as common names for organisms tend not to be precise enough. A very specific style of naming arose as a result.
The same ambiguity problems do not exist with regard to our own planet, satellite, or star. One could make the argument that, hypothetically, if we were in another star system, we’d need a way to refer unambiguously to the Sun. For complex reasons, I consider the “Sol” idea probably the least likely way this would be accomplished - and I don’t wish to discuss them here as that is not the topic of this thread. (The same argument does not even apply to the Earth or the Moon, and as such I think we can safely disregard those ideas entirely.) At any rate, the very specific mechanisms that have been developed to apply Latin names to newly-discovered organisms constitute a set of rules that is not in existence for creating star names. Any examination of species names, furthermore, reveals that they are not “Latin” in the sense of being something that would be comprehensible to Latin speakers, but rather they are a particular code that happens to have been derived from Latin. The fact that we use a Latin-derived code to assign unambiguous names to species has precisely zero bearing on claims that we should (or secretly do) name stars that way. As a matter of fact, comparatively few star names come from Latin at all. If we’re following standard practice, shouldn’t the Sun have an Arabic name?
Irrelevant. Real life is not science fiction.
You don’t agree that it’s pretentious to claim that the common term for something is not its “real name”, and that (to solve an imaginary problem that the laws of physics have made irrelevant) we should all recognize that there’s a secret “real name” that no one uses for the Sun? Making up little rules like this is pretentious because it presumes the right of the person making the assertion to make rules about the subject matter. It’s the same with people who make irrational claims about which word you’re allowed to use in a situation and which you’re not (“It’s ‘alternative’, not ‘alternate’!” and the like) - it’s pretentious to assume the mantle of deciding things like that. When one can quite easily factually determine that the sun’s “real name” is not, in fact, “Sol”, arguments to the contrary piss me off because (1) they are lies and (2) I’m annoyed that people believe themselves to have the right to declare what the Sun is “really” called.
Irrelevant. Purely irrelevant, as we are not on Alpha Centauri’s hypothetical earthlike planet. In case you missed it when I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread, current physics does not make it seem likely that we ever will manage to be on Alpha Centauri’s hypothetical earth-like planet. As I said above, I don’t particularly care to argue about what I think the better choice for a science fiction writer would be, because (1) I am not a science fiction writer and (2) that’s completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.