Europa is so cool
Europa is so cool
42 comments
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If you haven't read The Last Human by Zack Jordan, I highly recommend it. In between chapters, the reader is treated to excerpts from an Asmovian encyclopedia that explains the rules of the intergalactic society that the sole remaining human, the main character, has to navigate.
As part of joining the trillion-species-strong network, a species must fill out a form to dictate the nouns and adjectives for your species, home star, homeworld, sexual divisions (where applicable), and so on. It's noted in the book that since there are so many species already assigned values in the database, the encyclopedia warns that names like Earth, dirt, mud, moon, star, sol, and home are already taken, and are constantly rejected in proposals.
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That's a fun theory, but it does ignore that local languages are all different. For example, the name Canada comes from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word "kanata", meaning 'village' or 'settlement'. And it was misunderstood as the name of the area.
Many alien species naming their planets after dirt seems likely enough, but their word for it sounding like "Earth" in English is pretty low. We've got plenty of variations across languages even on our own planet: https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/earth
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A bunch of hosers were sittin' 'round the fire drinkin' beers. One of 'em said, "ya know, we should name our country, eh?"
"Oh yah, we should. How ya reckon we should do that?"
"Oh, it's easy! We take all the letters of the alphabet, write 'em on pieces of paper, and stick 'em all in a hat. Then we draw 'em out and see what our name is!"
"Oh, that's a great idea! I've got some paper right here donchaknow!"
So, they wrote all the letters of the alphabet on pieces of paper and threw 'em in a toque.
"All right, what's the first letter?"
"C, eh?"
"What's the next letter?"
"N, eh?"
"What the next letter?"
"D, eh?"
"OK, that seems long enough"
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Thank you kind stranger. This will make it even easier to make my favorite "fuck English" joke. https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/pineapple
Seriously, virtually everyone calls it some variation of Ananas, but along comes English and they are just like... Hmmm, obviously this should be names Pineapple and we should mock anyone who desires it on a pizza.
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In the book, the word you give is the translation into galactic standard, which is one uniform language. Earth would be translated into the same word as soil and dirt, and perhaps a few synnonyms could be pulled before the concept itself was milked dry.
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Could be an issue for some kind of universal translator that has a hard time with proper boundaries that are also regular nouns.
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Also
scientists naming our planet
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Terra?
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Dirt in Latin.
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To be fair, "moon" is pretty cool, it's just that every other moon now inherits an eponym from OG Moon
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What scientist named the earth's moon?
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The actual term is satellites. Blame media and maybe engineers. People constructed so many manmade ones that natural satellites got the moons rebranding.
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How is this getting upvotes? That's like saying your cow's name is actually "mammal". The post was not about a general term to label a group of things.
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Can't vouch for other languages, but at least in Russian, satellite (sputnik) is still in use alongside "moon"
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I voted for Mooney McMoonface
42 comments
Luna?
That's just Moon in Latin.
True, but it's also the name of the Roman godess, which does make it allign better with all the other astronomical names.
To be fair, we didn't know there were more until Galileo showed up late to the party with his telescope.
So? Nova Scotia is just New Scotland in Latin. That's still the name.
Edit: unless you're French, then it's Nouvelle-Écosse
Yes. Also used in other languages like russian.
Also in Spanish
I don’t know what the scientific community’s thoughts on it are, but I like the idea of “moon” being the generic term while Luna is the name of our moon.
Saying “the moon” still works because we only have one.