I think the Crabigator needs astronomy lessons

WK has spoken :man_shrugging:

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Why not? Gas giants are thought to have plenty of solids in their cores.

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“Ancient Chinese and Japanese culture designated the planet Saturn as the “earth star” (土星). This was based on Five Elements which were traditionally used to classify natural elements.” [Source: Wikipedia].

The planet names are based on Chinese astrology.

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I don’t think anyone questioned the name or its origins

In other news:

土曜日 → Saturday → Saturn → 土星

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Check this thread:

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You can with the power of microgravity… not considering the consider power of macrogravity generated by plausibly solid core…

You’re just not trying hard enough.

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I’ve modified this mnemonics as follows:

*I know it will be one of the planets, so it’s multiple choice question.
*Dirt → Urn (put dirt/ashes into urn)
*Saturn

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That’s a very smart one :open_mouth:

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How dare you insult the mighty Crabigator. Ke has been known to sit on Saturn on weekends.

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haha I remember having this conversation with my manager (since both of us are engineers) about how wrong the naming of the planets are in Japanese/Chinese and how they were obviously named prior to humans discovering the true nature of the planets.

Mercury - Water planet - second hottest planet in system plus no atmosphere. Ain’t no water here boi.

Venus - Gold planet - hottest planet in the solar system basically. As close as you can get to hell in real life. Nothing golden about this place. I can see why it is called the gold planet though since Venus is the 2nd most visible thing in the night sky usually (apart from our moon) and has a goldish tint to it.

Saturn - ground planet as OP mentioned. doesn’t exactly have a “ground” since it’s a gas giant.

Neptune - sea king planet - Intersting. I reckon the Chinese got this from the Greeks/Romans.

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Neptune wasn’t discovered until the mid 1800’s. It isn’t naked eye visible. Nothing past Saturn is, even without modern light pollution. It was named to be consistent with the other planets which had been known before that (similarly, Uranus and Pluto). So I think the Japanese and Chinese just translated the name as given to them by the astronomers of the day. Who were neither Greek, nor Roman, to my knowledge. :wink:

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Weirdly, knowing it’s a gas giant would make this easier for me to remember because I’ll always think about how funny it is. That’s the joke they’re making right? :zipper_mouth_face:

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You can’t sit on a gas giant D:

Challenge accepted

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Can we just hack nasa’s mainframes and change any definition of gas sat-urn?

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To me

It’s a star made entirely of sit-on-able ground.

Is very clearly tongue-in-cheek, so I would just take it as the joke it is. Might even help to remember that it’s about a planet where that specifically isn’t actually true.

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image

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I have ambiguous feelings about languages like Japanese who nowadays don’t create many new native words for concepts imported from another language. When telephone came to Japan, they called it 電話, which is cognate to its Chinese word. But for television, they basically just transliterate it to katakana テレビ. There probably was a time in Japan when people called television 電視 (でんし), but that was long ago and the term is mostly forgotten now.

Recently I was in Iceland, and they try to invent their own words for foreign concepts. Telephone is “simi” which is an old word for cord. Tank (war equipment) is “skriðdreki” which means crawling dragon. This makes it a bit difficult for foreigners learning the language, but there’s poetic beauty about a language resisting the temptation to import everything from English.

I know the French have tried this with mixed results. The word “courriel” was invented for email, and it’s still used in Canadian French. But most people in France still prefer “e-mail” to “courriel”.

Still, I’m glad that Japanese people call the planet Mercury 水星 instead of マーキュリー. I prefer to limit the use of katakana as much as possible.

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Oh yeah? Try and stop me.

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