• slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It does. The moon is officially called Luna.

    Also people have been known to all their cat Neko which is Japanese for cat.

    • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Our moon is officially called Moon. Luna is just something used occasionally, but not always. The sun is also officially named Sun. It’s just that those terms started being overloaded after we learned that there were other Moons and Suns. You can try to get all fancy with Sol and Luna, but those are just old Latin terms for Moon and Sun. They’re no less generic than the ones we currently use.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Names_and_etymology
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Etymology

    • Marty@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      The official name is “The Moon”, Luna just means moon in Latin. It’s all about capitalization. Moon is our moon, and moon is any moon.

    • Chiarottide@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Except “luna” is latin for “Moon”, which means that in many neolatin languages the problem is still there. Probably Selene would be good for every language, She’s the whatever goddess of the whateverness of our Moon or whatever

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Except when Latin was spoken actively there was only one such body with the name “Luna”, so it’s a proper noun.

    • oxomoxo@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Luna is the Latin word for moon. It’s not the official name in English. It’s just called “Moon” in English, just like the sun is just called “Sun” despite being many other words in other languages.

      Because there is just one of them it’s not really necessary to give it a unique name, but there are lots of options in Latin, Greek and other languages if you want to get fancy.