Where does the name Moon come from? Why do the moons around other planets have names and ours is just Moon? Can you imagine finding out that Jupiter has four moons? That's what Galileo discovered in 1610 - he'd only gotten a telescope in 1609. Then astronomers discovered five moons around Saturn. All of these newly discovered moons were given names to identify them -typically named for Greek myths - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
The name Moon comes from Old English: "mōna, which (like all its Germanic cognates) stems from Proto-Germanic *mēnōn, which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *mēnsis "month" (from earlier *mēnōt, genitive *mēneses) which may be related to the verb "measure" (of time).
Am I right to imagine that the name stuck because things were written down and archived in libraries and so we have a reference. Ancient peoples had names for the Moon before the Romans and Greeks, but their culture and languages are lost to us. I wonder what they would have called it. Would it have been named in relation to time similar to the Romans and Greeks?
It is Luna in Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Bulgarian. Why don't we call it Luna? I assume the answer has to do with how old 'Old English' is. The many groups that made up Anglo Saxons had various dialects that are referred to as Old English - around 550 - 1066. Then Middle English evolved from the 8th to the 12th century. Then we're into Early Modern English 1500 to 1700. Galileo lived from 1564 to 1642.
My curiosity of whether Galileo used the term luna leads me to a Galileo manuscript showing his observations of the Moon, Jupiter, Venus and the Sun.
Is anyone able to translate to find the reference to the Moon?
Yesterday our image was Butchart Gardens, and today our images are Marion Jarvie's garden in Toronto. We visited it yesterday. There seems a great similarity in design style between the two with the beautiful complex compositions.
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