QUOTE (nprev @ Apr 11 2008, 05:23 PM)
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Jason, any reason you know of why "mare" is placed at the end of a feature's proper name rather then at the beginning, as is the lunar convention?
I suspect this might be because of modern English colloquial usage vs. traditional Latin grammatical structure (we say "Pacific Ocean", not "Oceanus Pacificam"), plus the fact that the lunar 'seas' were misidentified, but it just seems odd that the terms are transposed on the only two non-terrestrial bodies in the Solar System with mares (definition notwithstanding).
That would be "Oceanus Pacificus" -- though my antique wall-map, lettered in both Latin and a Dutchman's interpretation of Spaniportitalian, actually has "Mare Pacificum", and that referring only to a small part of what it calls the "Mar del Zur".
Selenographic convention is "Mare X" (where X is usually a genitive -- the main exceptions are Mare Australe, Mare Orientale, and Mare Moscoviense), but in the traditional Martian nomenclature, both orders were used: in my small collection of areographic maps I find both "Mare Erythraeum" (1896) and "Erythraeum Mare" (1930), "Acidalium Mare" (1886) and "Mare Acidalium" (1896). The order is grammatically insignificant.