So if “the Sun” is Sol, and “the Earth” is Terra, does anybody know the proper name for the northernmost borough of New York City? I feel like a rube just calling it “the Bronx.”
::d&r::
I say “Broncorum”. (Plural genitive of a hypothetical Latin translation (“Broncus”) of the original last name, which was “Bronck”. It was originally a plantation owned by the Dutch Bronck family - thus it was called The Broncks’.)
It’s one of the boroughs of Novum Eboracum.
I actually agree with your position on the main question. However, I think your rant against “bad sci fi” really went off the rails. It drew a lot of fire because, just as you have correctly labelled some arguments here as counter-factual, it just was badly argued.
I can’t see the point in anyone ever making such charts, for these reasons at least:
[ol]
[li]If you’re considering the stars we’ve named so far, those are all clustered preferentially around the Sun, within a couple thousand light years of us. They are only a tiny portion of all the stars in the galaxy. From the viewpoint of the galactic center — 30,000 light years from here — these stars fall inside a narrow-ish cone in the local sky. They are also, most of them, dim and insignificant from there. They’d be lost in the slush of the other stars in the disk.[/li]
[li]The traditional constellations we’ve defined from Earth are pretty useless when viewed from the galactic center. If you plotted all the star-to-star links, you’d just see a tangled, shapeless pile of lines in one patch of the sky. Perhaps you could eventually invent new constellations based on nearby bright stars, ones we don’t even know about yet, but what’s the point of that?[/li]
[li]There’s a giant black hole at the center of our galaxy — which means you don’t want to be in a position where galactic-center star charts would accurately match what you see in the sky. Certainly it would be the last thing you ever see.[/li][/ol]
Our Sun, if it could be observed at all from near the galactic center, would more likely be given a 12-digit ID number in the imposing Absolutely Complete Star Catalogue of the Milky Way. (Don’t look for it yet in stores). Plotting any galactic-center star chart that included our Sun would probably result in a solid black piece of paper.
I think everyone can agree that the International Astronomical Union is the definitive organization for the tracking, cataloguing and naming of all objects and features planetary, stellar, or otherwise astronomic.
From the IAU rules on planetary nomenclature:
The IAU rules themselves call the planet Earth “Earth”.
Later on the page, are the naming conventions:
It seems they call the Moon, “Moon”.
From the FAQ on Buying Star Names:
They call the Sun “Sun” and acknowledge that it has other names in other languages.
From the Spelling of Names of Astronomical Objects
So the proper English spelling of Earth as recommended by the IAU is “Earth”, Sun is “Sun”, and Moon is “Moon”.
Of course the IAU is a scientific organization. It makes recommendations and encourages the use of their names but can’t (and won’t) enforce them. You’re free to call the Earth “Terra”, the Moon “Luna” and the Sun “Sol” if you like.
So qurax is Somali! I looked it up; they’re right. I had it spelled differently in my notes, because the source I used years ago dated from before the official Somali orthography was introduced in 1972, and the words are all spelled differently. I must update my notes. By the way, the letter “x” in Somali is pronounced as a laryngeal /h/ sound. Breathing out audibly by making a hiss in the middle of the throat.
So nobody can identify “Naytheet.” Well, I think my identification of Ethiopic for “Ir” is a pretty good educated guess.
In Malay, the sun is called mata hari (yes, it’s the same name you’re thinking of). Literally, this means ‘the eye of the day’. Isn’t that poetic? Mata means ‘eye’ and hari means ‘day’. Malay is an Austronesian language.
In the Nogay Tatar language, spoken in the northeastern Caucasus region, the sun is called kün közi, which again means ‘eye of the day’. Kün means ‘day’ and köz means ‘eye’. Nogay Tatar is an Altaic language. The resemblance in the poetic names for sun in these unrelated languages spoken at the opposite ends of Asia is apparently just a coincidence, though what a coincidence.
The idea shows up in a lot of languages; in Old Irish, the cognate of this sol that’s causing so much trouble in this thread is súil, which has become the ordinary word for “eye.” And we have the sun = eye thing in English, too. Shakey’s Sonnet 18, “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines” & the little flower daisy < “day’s eye” (think of the center of the flower as the sun and the petals as rays).
I’ll give you Shakey’s Sonnet 18!
Sometime too hot the pizza oven shines