Why is Earth's moon still named just "The Moon" (and our sun still named "The Sun")

Olas

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It's not a very creative title is it?

Every other planet in our solar system has moons with actual names derived from roman and greek mythology. Ours is just "The Moon", and that's not just what most people call it, that's it's actual official name according to science. The Sun ([a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1333776/Spanish-woman-Angeles-Duran-claims-owns-sun--plans-start-charging-ALL-users.html"]which is apparently owned by spanish woman[/a]) has the same weird dilemma.
What will alien races think when they come to earth and find out we named our sun and moon "The Sun" and "The Moon".

Our name for the planet being "earth" isn't much better when you consider that they might just as well have called it planet Dirt. But I digress.

So my questions are:

Do you think it makes sense to keep calling Earth's moon just "The Moon", and Earth's sun "The Sun" now that we know there are countless other moons and suns out there?

Do you think we'll change this ever, and if so when?

What should we change it's name to?

Edit: And for the record, no, their names aren't "Sol" and "Luna". I wish they were, but I recently found out that's an old wive's tale. It's just in Star Trek and Mass Effect and probably a few other Sci-fi universes, not RL unfortunately.

I've googled it already:

http://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-suns-name

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=155

http://www.universetoday.com/18701/name-of-the-sun/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

http://www.accessscience.com/studycenter.aspx?main=3&questionID=701

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=289


Edit 2: I changed the thread title to better represent what I'm really asking. Maybe people will give me some slack now.
 

Heronblade

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sol and luna are generally the accepted "names" for those particular bodies. Granted, those are just the latin versions of moon and sun, but they suffice.

As to why, the naming convention was established long before we were (knowingly) aware of any other moons or suns, and changing it now would be... difficult.
 

DoPo

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I believe it is because people used to call the big bright thing in the sky "sun" and the other smaller but still big bright thing "moon". It was after that they found out that they didn't live on the only planet, and other planets also had these two things - some times even in greater quantity. So they went "meh" and called all the sun looking things suns, same for the moon looking ones, so the former name, became the whole class of things.
 

JoJo

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It doesn't particularly bother me, it's usually clear whether you're talking about a moon or the Moon depending on the grammar and capitalisation. Besides, our Sun and Moon were the original two who were named that, it was Galileo I believe who first discovered through his invention of the telescope that there were moons other than our own and much later I think that it was confirmed that the stars were indeed the same kind of body as our Sun.

Also, languages other than English use completely different terms of course and may or may not have this problem.
 

SckizoBoy

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Heronblade said:
sol and luna are generally the accepted "names" for those particular bodies. Granted, those are just the latin versions of moon and sun, but they suffice.

As to why, the naming convention was established long before we were (knowingly) aware of any other moons or suns, and changing it now would be... difficult.
Yeah, pretty much that...

'The Sun' was the first star (astronomical definition) humans observed and recorded... 'The Moon' was the first planetary satellite humans observed and recorded... (probably, this idiot - me, that is, not [user]Heronblade[/user] - doesn't know for sure)

With regards to the etymology, 'moon' comes from some early-Germanic variant of 'maenon' and quite why we use that instead of the Latin/Greek (Luna/Selene), I haven't the faintest idea. As for 'sun', same deal, from 'sunnon' and likewise for Latin/Greek (Sol/Helios) etc. etc. etc.
 

Smertnik

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Before the invention of those fancy telescopes people only knew one "moon" and one "sun" - ours. And as with all things in the world they had to be named and the names became the general terms for similar celestial bodies once those have been discovered. That's how language works, I'm pretty sure it'd be the same for any other extraterrestrial sentient species.
 

Hagi

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On the moon you're correct, but the sun is a star and we don't call other stars suns I think. At least not officially.

Might change though if we ever go to another solar system, would we call the star there a sun or simply a star whilst being there?

For now though there's only a single celestial body referred to as "sun", our own star.
 

Asita

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Well to be fair, there are already fairly well established alternatives.

Sun: Sol
Moon: Luna
Earth: Terra (and, less popularly, "Gaia")
 

Wyes

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'Moon' is a generic term, 'Sun' is not. Our Sun is a star, but it is the only Sun. What I'm saying is that our star is called the Sun (or Sol, hence Solar System; on that note, ours is the only Solar System, all others are Planetary Systems or what have you). As for why we call our moon the Moon, I suspect that's a matter of 'Oh look, there's this giant thing in the sky called the Moon. It looks like other planets have something similar, let's just call them all moons'. Though, the Moon is also known as 'Luna'.
 

Folji

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DoPo said:
I believe it is because people used to call the big bright thing in the sky "sun" and the other smaller but still big bright thing "moon". It was after that they found out that they didn't live on the only planet, and other planets also had these two things - some times even in greater quantity. So they went "meh" and called all the sun looking things suns, same for the moon looking ones, so the former name, became the whole class of things.
Awh shucks, I wanted to say something clever like that! Wonder if it'd work to plant some kind of idea throughout society that we should refer to the two by their "real"/scientific names instead, and how many decades would go by before Sol, Luna and Terra is the way to go.
 

TorqueConverter

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lol wut?

We call our Star the sun and our satellite the moon. All stars are not suns and all natural satellites are not moons.
 

Vault101

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OlasDAlmighty said:
uuhhhh

I thourght our moon was Luna and out Sun was called Sol

people call them "the x" because we all know which particualr sun/moon we are talking about anyway

Asita said:
Well to be fair, there are already fairly well established alternatives.

Sun: Sol
Moon: Luna
Earth: Terra (and, less popularly, "Gaia")
I like Terra...its like Terry [i/]"oh hey! thats just terry over there in the milky way"[/i]
 

Joccaren

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Largely because 'Why change when its not needed?'. One day when we live on other planets and in other solar systems, perhaps we will rename our sun and moon. Until then, its generally accepted to call the sun and moon by their latin names as a way of naming them other than "The Sun" and "The Moon": Sol and Luna respectively.
As for the Earth, eh, it works as a name. Sure, it describes what its made of, but its not calling it Planet Dirt or just The Planet, its an actual name - though not one from Greek, Roman or Latin mythology/language.
 

BlazeRaider

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I propose we rename them something more respectable.

The Sun --> Celestia
The Moon --> Luna

:D

Let's also rename space in general as discord.
 

Not G. Ivingname

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Because they are our sun and our moon.

There are many like it, but this one is ours.

Literally, that is the entire reason.
 

AgentNein

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My friend deb has a pet chicken named Chicken, you tellin' me you got a problem with Chicken?! That chicken is a saint!

Side note, chicken hatched a baby chick, they named her Biscuits. Everybody's cue to go 'awwwww!'

This is my roundabout way of saying I don't have much real input to this thread. I think it simply is an artifact of a time when we had no real form of measurement of the things in our sky but our own two eyes, and those two celestial objects were the most significant things. Then we realized out of all of those stars, a bunch are the same thing as our big sun just much further away, and same went for the moon. Maybe.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Because when they were named no one new that there were other suns and moons out there, therefore our sun and moon didn't need special names. Sun and moon were proper nouns in those days.