Hydaelyn's Star

[Myranda]

I know this is secondary to the thread topic, but I think you're overstating the disconnect here. Sol is not merely a Latin translation, it's the Latin name of the Sun. Sun is also a generalized word for a star, all of which have another distinct name. Likewise for moon. It's common to use Sol and Luna to distinguish our sun and moon from other ones in astronomy, not just in science-fiction, because these terms are not specific enough in popular usage. Doubly so in the context of space travel. Similarly, Solar System is ordinarily reserved for our star system to distinguish it from say, the Alpha Centauri system.

Although the International Astronomical Union says that the name of the Moon is the Moon, it also concedes that it has many names in various languages and then cites several languages that call it Luna (Latin, Spanish, Italian, Russian). All of these languages (and many more, including Klingon) also use Sol and Terra or an approximate derivative. Honestly it's a little weird that these should be singled out for names of Germanic origin while the rest of the planets, dwarf planets and moons all follow a different convention until you get to things that were only discovered very recently. Sort of a blend of the fact that English is accepted as the international language for professional astronomy, but wasn't the language of the first people to discover most of the other planets. Typically the discoverer gets naming rights, although the Roman Empire usurped these for the known objects of its time even including things that were already discovered.

I guess my point is, Sol and Luna WERE (one of) the (many) names before English even existed. If you want to be old fashioned or resist the dominance of English like me, you're not really wrong to use Sol or Luna, or even refer to the native inhabitants of our planet as Terrans. Most languages, especially older languages like Babylonian and Sumerian tended to name the sun and moon after their own gods, too. Azeyma is clearly the Eorzean personification of their sun, if not also the literal embodiment and namesake. If anything, calling it the sun would be a convention that exists primarily to distinguish between Azeyma the personification and Azeyma the star, as noted by the example cited of Eorzeans who worship Azeyma referring to the sun as 'she' rather than 'it', indicating that in some regions of Eorzea this separation is hazy at best. A better question may be, what do the people on different continents who don't worship The Twelve call it?

A translation or the Latin name, call it what you will: it's still just a language thing. Sure, Sol and Luna can be considered valid names for them in those languages, where those are just the words for sun and moon, and would sound just as plain as "Sun" and "Moon" to speakers of those languages. What I'm really trying to say is it makes no sense to mix the languages, regardless of which one came first, and we more or less actually agree here. The IAU statement is indeed more of just "English is in general the international language of science," as you mentioned. For certain though, my original reason for writing that was to refute that Sol is somehow objectively more correct than The Sun in all circumstances, particularly in English where it certainly is not. It's all relative to the culture/language.

Needing them to distinguish against other objects is unnecessary though. For that we have the words "stars" and "satellites" or catalog designations like HD155322 if precision is needed like in a scientific journal, not to mention in most cases the context provides enough information there would never be confusion. The terms suns and moons only exist in general usage for other objects as a historical artifact once we advanced our knowledge to realize the stars were in fact the same kind of objects we already knew about as our Sun. But journals certainly never use Sol or Luna if written in English, that only occurs in sci-fi, poetry, and other arts. I never saw it in grad school, at least. Such usage would probably raise serious eyebrows in peer review/editing. (I will admit, I did think of one example where the word sol is used scientifically, non-capitalized, after the fact of writing this. It is used to describe the length of a day on other worlds, particularly for the rovers on Mars, to distinguish it from the 24hr days of Earth. In theory they could just use the phrase Martian day or similar for other planets, so I'm not sure of the history of how this usage came into common practice. I suspect it may have to do with reducing word/page count in articles to reduce publishing costs.)

Naming of other objects is a bit hairy, especially when you're going back to the ancient times of naked eye astronomy where pretty much every culture across the entire globe knew the same stuff about the stars at the same time but just had different names for them before an internationally agreed system was established and telescopes began to reveal new objects. All I'll say there is "history is written by the victors", and as such Latin/English terminology has generally prevailed, though many bright stars do retain their Arabic names.

Bringing it back to FFXIV, the bit about the physical Sun versus the personification is interesting though, and it raises the possibility that we may not be able to say the Moon and Sun are necessarily named Menphina and Azeyma. Egyptian mythology can be an example of this, where Aten meant the disk of the sun, which was just an aspect of the whole sungod, Ra. Of course, Egyptian beliefs and dieties shifted over time with the incorporation of Amun into Amun-Ra, etc so even that's not a clear cut example, but I think the point stands that the name doesn't have to be shared.

Asking what other continents on Hydaelyn call it I don't think helps that much, other than to bring us right back to the different languages argument. They may not even call the planet Hydaelyn for all we know, it's just a culture thing, and sheds no light on any sort of objective universal fact. It would still be interesting to learn of other FFXIV societies, though.