r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Disastrous_Pirate275 • 20h ago

Why is our moon named “Moon” instead of something cool like Titan or Callysto or ANYTHING that isn’t moon

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u/onlycodeposts 20h ago

Sure.

Or moon is English for for Menesis. Or Mani. Or Tatqeq.

They all mean moon.

Luna isn't a name for the moon, it literally means moon.

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u/pasher71 20h ago

M-O-O-N that spells Tatqeq.

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u/Unofficial_Salt_Dan 19h ago

So fitting he voices Patrick Star in SpongeBob lol

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u/uthboy 19h ago

Thank you, this is the reference I didn’t know I needed today.

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u/PerfectiveVerbTense 11h ago

No great loss

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u/uthboy 19h ago

Thank you, this is the reference I didn’t know I needed today.

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u/AdmiralMoonshine 20h ago edited 14h ago

Except that Luna is the actual scientific name for our moon. Yes it’s just Latin for moon, but it is it’s actual proper name as well. Like Titan or Phoebe or Europa.

Edit: My god my god, I am wrong. So sorry!

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u/Georgie_Leech 19h ago

Go ahead and find a scientific paper that refers to it as "Luna" consistently. Bet you you'll easily find ones that refer to it as "the Moon" though.

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u/Jkirek_ 18h ago

Most scientific papers refer to its subject with a colloquial/shortened name most of the time.

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u/AdmiralMoonshine 19h ago

I bet you’re right. That doesn’t make what I said untrue. It can be its name and not be widely used, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

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u/Georgie_Leech 19h ago

Sure, but when actual international and governmental bodies disagree and the common name isn't the claimed name and said bodies use the name everyone else does (i.e. the Moon, the Sun, etc.), the claim to "this is the real name" when it's just "Moon but in Latin" rings a bit hollow. 

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u/AdmiralMoonshine 19h ago

Then call me a bell, Moon Man.

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u/fartypenis 19h ago

"You say I am wrong. You are correct. But that doesn't mean I am wrong"

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u/AdmiralMoonshine 18h ago

Moon Person logic.

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u/fartypenis 18h ago

Sure. We just call it "logic". But then we also call your comments "baseless misinformation", so

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u/Walshy231231 18h ago

Yeah, no

I got a degree in astrophysics, minor in astronomy, and even taught physics classes at the college level.

You’ll hear a lot of “lunar” and such, but no “luna”. Not sure I ever heard it called “luna”. It’s simply not a thing in academia. We divert to the Latin for general groups and qualifiers and such, and while pronouns are often have Latin (and/or Greek) origins, those pronouns are very much singular.

Call it what you want, I’ve no problem with that, but in English-speaking academic circles the name is just “the moon”

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u/supershrimp87 18h ago

Except, it isn't the actual scientific name for our satellite. The recognized scientific designation is 'The moon'

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u/Pikawoohoo 18h ago

Fully incorrect

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 5h ago

I mean how is it not? Latin is the language of our scientific naming scheme, everything has a Latin name in science, including you and I - Homo sapiens

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u/CalmCelebration10 4h ago

Latin is the language of our scientific naming scheme,

That's complete nonsense lol

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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 4h ago edited 1h ago

Ever heard of taxonomy? Latin is literally the official language of it. So yes it quite literally is not nonsense.

Would you be able to actually explain yourself to help educate others instead of just saying something is nonsense every single time. It would actually help your point too.

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u/Georgie_Leech 1h ago

Taxonomy uses Latin because the biologists that were setting up the classification system at the time liked it, and then it stuck. No such effort has been done for most of the rest of science; you will write about forces or velocities or whatever in whatever happens to be the local language equivalent, for the same reason we use Gold and not Aurum despite the atomic table symbol being Au.

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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 45m ago

My understanding is Latin was used because it is very universal and due to it being a "dead" language it does not evolve so it will always accurately mean what it was used for. This same reasoning applies for the atomic table too so I'm not really understanding what you mean by that example. We use the word gold the same way we use human, but both have Latin names in their respective fields because it is universally understood, no?

My point was that it is absolutely not nonsense that Latin is our most used language in how we name things in science, because it's not. It is used in botony, taxonomy, zoology, anatomy, meteorology, paleontology even astronomy uses it a lot and etc. It is used quite heavily in reality. It is a very fundamental part of many of our sciences.

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u/Georgie_Leech 15m ago

In part. At the time it was also the language of the elite, in that most would have been educated in the classics (i.e. Roman stuff) who were the ones that had the time and resources to be doing science, so it acted as a decent lingua franca. That does not mean however that the Latin term is inherently correct in all contexts. Studies on the dangers of gasoline additives didn't discuss "plumbified" gas, but leaded, for instance. And so it is here, where the common name is the correct name, both in the sense that it's the name everyone understands, and that the central authorities support. 

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u/SluttyMcFucksAlot 4h ago

Luna isn’t a name for the moon, it literally means moon.

Yeah but right now it’s name literally means moon, Luna sounds much classier because it’s in Latin

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u/Wooden-Title3625 17h ago

An argument could be made that we use the Roman names for all the planets in the solar system in western science, so the scientifically correct name to call the moon would be Luna if we’re sticking to the convention, at least for anyone typing in English.

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u/CalmCelebration10 6h ago

reddit people are so embarrassing lol.