[X] My Assistant

[ToSeek]

"Sol" is a well-established byname in science fiction for the Sun (much as "Terra" is for the Earth). That, I suspect is where the Viking people got it from. The word itself doubtless comes from "solar" (much as "Terra" probably derives from "terrestrial", which can be used as both an adjective as well as a byname for the (human) inhabitants of Earth).

Both terms come straight from the Latin:

Sol is Latin for Sun
Terra is Latin for Earth

Kevin

[chris]

A thought just occurred - is the word 'sol' only applicable to Mars? If we had a rover on Mercury or Vemus, what word would we use?

Chris.

PS. It just ocurred to me. If we had put use planet names to distinguish where a sol was, then a day
on Mars could be referred to as an aresol

[Aldebaran]

A thought just occurred - is the word 'sol' only applicable to Mars? If we had a rover on Mercury or Vemus, what word would we use?

Chris.

We might as well use the word year plus or minus 18 earth days for Venus.

[stevesliva]

Always pronounced it like doll

I've always gone with the sol in SOLar and not the doll in dollar. And I'm in the US... but have a tendency to maul A's like a new yawker.

[tty]

English words derived from the latin word 'sol'...(sun) I believe that it is also the source of words referring to being alone or solo. (The sun is alone)

Solar
solo
solstice
solemnity

Solo is derived from latin solus "only" which is a different root while solemnity comes from sollemnis, I'm not sure whether this has anything to do with the sun. It might well have since one of the meanings of the word is "annual". Solstice comes from solstitium which is indeed derived from the word for sun.

It might be worth noting that while the west germanic languages use a form with a "n" (Sun, Sonne) the north germanic languages has kept the original "l" so in the Scandinavian languages the word for Sun is Sol (rhymes with Sole).

tty

[Aldebaran]

Solo is derived from latin solus "only" which is a different root while solemnity comes from sollemnis, I'm not sure whether this has anything to do with the sun. It might well have since one of the meanings of the word is "annual". Solstice comes from solstitium which is indeed derived from the word for sun.

It might be worth noting that while the west germanic languages use a form with a "n" (Sun, Sonne) the north germanic languages has kept the original "l" so in the Scandinavian languages the word for Sun is Sol (rhymes with Sole).

tty

And if you really want to get into it, solemnis derives from an older Etruscan word, as do most Latin words with the mn combination, such as autumnus or omnis

(Reference my website: http://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/language.html )

[ustrax]

Sol is still the Portuguese word for Sun, it sounds like "doll".
Earth, in our language, also kept the latin origin: Terra.

BTW, here's a database from the Coimbra University and a link for the great work of a portuguese team that integrates the data recovered by the different instruments onboard Mars Express (in Portuguese only).

[Pavel]

It might be worth noting that while the west germanic languages use a form with a "n" (Sun, Sonne) the north germanic languages has kept the original "l" so in the Scandinavian languages the word for Sun is Sol (rhymes with Sole).

Is it possible that the word Sol for Mars was inspired by the Latin word (Latin being the language of scientists), by the science fiction (because going to Mars was the sci-fi writers' dream) and by the Viking word (since the first mission to mars was called Viking)?

That would be the ultimate triple pun!

[JRehling]

However, I would like David to post a recording of typical 5th century inhabitants of the English Isles speaking concerning issues like a solar eclipse.

There actually are some decent ways to reconstruct ancient pronunciations. Rhymed verse and alternate spellings help a lot. Obviously, that approach goes only so far, and there are bootstrapping problems, but there is a lot of scholarly work on ancient pronunciation!

[dvandorn]

Yes -- I was always impressed with one of the means by which original Shakespearian pronunciation was deduced.

In one of the plays (I don't recall which one, offhand), one of the characters is asked for a reason for something. His reply is that "reasons are as plentiful as nuts in a fruitcake."

When someone finally connected the contemporary pronunciation to the present-day Scottish burr, they realized that "reason" must have been pronounced with the first vowel resembling a long A more than a long E (as in the current Scots accent). So, the line would have sounded like "Raisins are as plentiful as nuts in a fruitcake."

Thereby, a Shakespearian pun shed light on the pronunciation of English in those times.



-the other Doug

[David]

Yes -- I was always impressed with one of the means by which original Shakespearian pronunciation was deduced.

In one of the plays (I don't recall which one, offhand), one of the characters is asked for a reason for something. His reply is that "reasons are as plentiful as nuts in a fruitcake."

When someone finally connected the contemporary pronunciation to the present-day Scottish burr, they realized that "reason" must have been pronounced with the first vowel resembling a long A more than a long E (as in the current Scots accent). So, the line would have sounded like "Raisins are as plentiful as nuts in a fruitcake."

It's a cute story. It happens to be wrong in several ways. One is that the line quoted isn't exactly Shakespeare's (there is the less amusing "if reasons were as plentiful as blackberries", King Henry IV Part I, Act 2 ,Scene 4).

Two is that, although it's true that in Shakespeare's time (and for a long time afterwards), the "ea" in "reason" (and many other words) was pronounced something (not exactly) like the ai in "raisin", at the very same time the ai sound was pronounced differently, and the two sounds have always been distinct (though they have been closer in sound to each other).

Three is that we have much better resources for determining Shakespearean pronunciation, including a continuous record of phonetic pronunciation guides that begin at the beginning of the 17th century (from about the time of Shakespeare's death) and continue to the present, in which sounds are both described in ways that are intelligible to a modern phoneticist and compared to other languages whose sounds are also known -- things which give us an excellent understanding of the pronunciation of the language of the period.

Rhymes and puns do contribute to our knowledge of pronunciation, but more for earlier periods, and always subject to the limitation that both rhymes and puns need not be exact.

[Gray]

And now for something completely different, id est way off topic. In the Malay and Indonesian languages, languages which AFIK have no relation to Latin or Greek, the word for sun is actually a combination of words for 'eye' and 'day'.
eye = mata
day = hari

So the word for sun is matahari.

[karolp]

And now for something completely different, id est way off topic. In the Malay and Indonesian languages, languages which AFIK have no relation to Latin or Greek, the word for sun is actually a combination of words for 'eye' and 'day'.
eye = mata
day = hari

So the word for sun is matahari.

Check this out: the Polish word for the Sun is Slonce, pronounced a bit like "SWAN-TSEH". With the "Sun" element and a Scandivian "n" in it.

[Aldebaran]

And now for something completely different, id est way off topic. In the Malay and Indonesian languages, languages which AFIK have no relation to Latin or Greek, the word for sun is actually a combination of words for 'eye' and 'day'.
eye = mata
day = hari

So the word for sun is matahari.

/esotheric mode on
Malay and Indonesian languages may be unrelated to Latin and Greek, but they have a lot of of Sanskrit influence in their vocabulary (as well as Arabic). Sanskrit is a Satem group Indo European language, distantly related to both Latin and Greek. The word Hari probably derives from the Indo European root for the Sun, and also means 'god' in some usages eg hari krishna, hari vishnu etc. Hari in Sanskrit also means yellow, or the colour of the sun. Hari is derived from the Indo European root 'Gheli' which gives us yellow via the Anglosaxon 'geolu'. The nearest derived words in Greek close to Sanskrit hari are 'Chloros', which means greenish yellow, and hermero, meaning day.

Then there is Latin Heri, meaning 'yesterday', which gives us French hier etc.