So, is the route map in reply #1822 the most current? I was thinking that that was yestersols map.


BTW, we all agree that 'sol' is pronounced like 'soul' or 'sole' and not 'saul'. (Being a latin derived word)

I thought it rhymed with doll myself.

"I thought it rhymed with doll myself."

That's how I say it. There's no need to go back to the original Latin pronunciation - this word has its roots in Latin, but it's basically an English word (invented during the Viking mission, presumably right at JPL... anyone know when it was first used and by whom?)

Phil

That's how I say it too Sol rhymes with Doll and LOL
Roy F

If you say it like it rhymes with 'sole', you're saying a word that comes from the latin meaning "sun". If you say it like it rhymes with 'doll' you're saying a word that comes from the latin meaning "salt".

There's a conventional set of pronunciations for Anglicized Latin, which allows Latin and Latin-derived words to be pronounced without unduly discommoding habitual English speakers. These pronunciations derive, through the medieval English pronunciation of Latin, from the early medieval French pronunciation of Latin, and ultimately from the way that high-register Latin would have been pronounced by the speakers of Gallic popular Latin in the 5th and 6th centuries. So it has a long and continuous pedigree that goes back to Latin itself, whereas the reconstructed scholarly pronunciation of Latin only goes back to the 16th century.

As a result, most English speakers will say Veenus instead of Waynoose, Marz instead of Marse, and Joopader insead of Yoop-peetair.

If, therefore, English speakers choose to pronounce "sol" like "doll" or "poll", and pronounce "sal" like the name of a gal, they may not pass muster with Latin teachers of the 21st century, but they will be part of a fine old tradition extending back more than 15 centuries.

This is a continuation of the discussion started in replies 1833 to 1839 in this thread. http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...681&st=1830

David, you bring an interesting point that I was not aware of. (reply 1838) To me, it does seem that, in modern English, a word that has it's roots from the latin 'sol' (sun) we have a typical pronounciation protocol. If we are saying an English word that has it's roots in the latin 'sal' (salt) it seems to consistently be pronounced differently.

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

English words derived from 'sal' (salt)

Salad
saline


To me, it seems that, in modern English, if the word comes from the latin'sol' it is more commonly pronounced 'sole'. If we want to speak English as David claims they did in the 5th and 6th centuries, maybe we should pronounce the Martian day as though it rhymes with 'doll'. 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.

I don't think it matters too much exactly how you say it. The accepted pronunciation of a word is the one that is used most, regardless of derivation. There is also so much regional variation in phonetic values that it becomes academic anyway. For example John is pronounced with o like orange in the UK, and like Jahn in the US. Some usages that used to be grammatically correct will eventually die out, like the use of 'I will' as opposed to 'I shall' as an emphasis. Language is dynamic.

The point that was made about various Latin pronunciations is also correct. When I was taught Latin, vivat regina was pronounced vee-vat raygeenah (hard g), whereas in Tom Brown's Schooldays, it would have been vie-vat rejynah.

"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).

======
Stephen

In my Latin classes we said "wee-waht". Or we should have.

As this is one topic where I probably do not know less than the average UMSFer, I could go on in some detail about the nature of the Anglicized pronunciation, its history, and comparison with the revived classical Latin pronunciation, but I have a hard time justifying doing so on this forum!

With regard to "doll" and "dole", for some speakers the two are almost indistinguishable. "Doll" isn't universally pronounced "dahl" even in the United States. In my own dialect, there is a strong tendency to overround the o before a final l, e.g. in words like boll, knoll, roll, poll, toll, troll. I don't distinguish, in speaking, roll from role, or poll from pole. Doll however I pronounce to rhyme with haul, which is in my dialect (or perhaps in this case idiolect) distinct from both hall and hole. In general this spelling distinction cannot be trusted to map accurately to individual distinctions of pronunciation.

I have always imagined "sol" being pronounced like "sole", but I have no tremor at other pronunciations, within reasonable limits.

FWIW, the majority of people at JPL seem to pronounce it "sahl" (kinda rhymes with "doll" I guess, or maybe it's closer to "saul".) I used to try to pronounce it "soul" but most people don't seem to say it that way.

I've always pronounced it as sôl, which approximately rhymes with saul and fall. It's sort of a compromise between a long and a short "O." When the word was coined, I naturally associated it with a common name of the sun, and pronounced it according to my perception of the modern pronunciation of that word. However it is supposed to be pronounced, I will likely not bother to change my habit, since virtually everyone who I communicate with using this word is via the keyboard.

Where do you think we will find Opportunity after the Sol 919 drive?

Always pronounced it like doll

Doug

English Isles? Oooh - careful... maybe British Isles?

Listening to the islands' 5th century inhabitants probably wouldn't help a great deal with pronouncing Sol... English barely existed then... the Angles, Saxons, etc. were only just started their immigration into south-eastern England. The vast majority of the Britain's population (not Ireland), from modern-day southern Scotland all the way south through England and Wales, would have spoken the celtic language Brythonic, or British (the most widely-spoken descendant language being modern Welsh).

The latinization of English mainly took place after the Norman conquest a few centuries later, hence David's discussion of the Gallic origins of words related to Sol.

I can't come up with the Brythonic terms for eclipse etc., but the modern Welsh word for Sun is "Haul" (almost rhyming with "mile"). Interestingly, although itself heavily latinized following the Roman conquest, Brythonic had a word for Sun that was clearly more closely related to the Greek Helios. Solar eclipse in Welsh is "diffyg ar yr haul", or "clip ar yr haul", though the latter is probably a mangling of the English "eclipse".

You probably weren't asking for a mini-lecture like this, were you? Sorry!

The pronunciation of Sol will I think always differ on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Ask anyone called Bob. As clearly demonstrated by Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder II, it sounds very different here to the "Bahb" used in the US!

Me too.

Chris

Edit: Jut realised how confusing this could be. We pronounce the word
as 'sohl' rather the American 'sahl'.

Both terms come straight from the Latin:

Sol is Latin for Sun
Terra is Latin for Earth

Kevin

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

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

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.

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 )

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).

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!

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!

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

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.

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.

/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.