Thread: Naming planets
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Old 26-June-2009, 10:03 PM
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dwnielsen dwnielsen is offline
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No single example is a valid sampling. Fortunately the naming process applies to thousands of bodies.
I'm not speaking of thousands. My point is that the major bodies of the solar system should include figures that have had a major influence on world tradition, and attempt to maintain a sense of order and consistency. I did make a mistake, meaning to list Eris as "Discordia".

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So you have something against the actual spoken traditions of present-day Rapa Nui people? What makes you reject their traditions in favour of ancient inaccessible ones? By that reasoning, we must reject Latin and Greek tradition, since it is merely a shadow of the unknown proto-Indo-European mythos, which in turn reflected even earlier traditions.
We cannot easily see back that far, although some have tried and done a pretty respectable job of constructing a unified world tradition (Santillana/Dechend and many others). It is not yet entirely consistent and ordered. The ideas must grow out naturally. I do not think that the current naming will be the best possible, but it is at least a stepping stone to a better one.

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It's a pun. It doesn't need to connect to the ancient Rapa Nui people.
It's not really a pun; both were discovered on the declared day of Easter. Was there some significance as spring is supposedly a time of death of the old and birth of the new? In this case Eris was the new-comer.

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I'm no great fan of Mike Brown's rather laboured word-play myself, but discoverers are permitted to make linkages that we don't necessarily like.
And we are permitted to ignore them. Else Uranus is "Georgium Sidus"; Ceres is "Ceres Ferdinandea".

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And again I have to respond that you have selected a single data point from a large sampling process. By the same reasoning, one wonders how we justify the name of the planet Venus. Were there not also male gods? Were there not gods with other preoccupations apart from love? It's a ridiculously unrepresentative name; I reject it utterly.
Half the human population approximately is female. Venus comes from Latin meaning "to come" and is related to many words still used every day by us. It represents a lot: prettiness, self-absorption, romantic love, sex. It does not represent all women, so there should be more females in the solar system and are, such as Ceres, Vesta, Hygiea, Eris. Where is a big Juno? A big Cybele? A big Minerva?
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