Spreading the video http://neilghosh.com/2011/02/19/veronica-on-astronomy/

Roll credits.

And it’s all perfectly fine.

Interesting. Are they English (as in from England) by any chance? The Webster’s I have from 1958 gives yoo-ráy-nus first and úr-eh-nus as an alternate. I suspect the latter was preferred on the eastern side of the pond.

I can honestly say I never heard the Urine Us pronunciation until after the Voyager spacecraft first arrived and TV talking heads suddenly found themselves having to say Your Anus on the air.

To John Hynes’s “In neither Latin nor Greek is there a ‘you’ in the name, so I don’t know why it is considered correct to have one there in English.”
A: Because that’s how English anglicizes words from Latin and Greek. Long u‘s sound like /yoo/ unless the preceding consonant is apical (t, d, s, z, n, sh, zh, ch, j or r, and usually th and l, especially at the beginning of a word).

As to “Uranus” it depends on whether the a was long in Latin. If it was, then that’s where the accent is. If not, the the accent is on the first u. I don’t have my Latin dictionary handy at the moment.

Not according to some old dictionaries I have about. In both the 1966 and 1936 volumes, Urine Us is the only pronunciation given.

But enough nit-picking… this is funny (and informative) stuff!

I don’t think that’s a problem, she was speaking historically and that WAS the most important immediate outcome. The idea of a Kuiper belt didn’t gain much traction until decades after Pluto’s discovery, and we didn’t start finding more members of it until 1992! I agree that the Kuiper belt should be given equal billing to the asteroid belt in textbooks, but she was giving a particular example, not describing our current knowledge of the region.

In most languages, “Charon” the satellite — or, arguably, dwarf planet — is pronounced in the same way as the Greek god, but, in English, it is usually pronounced with a “sh” as a courtesy to the discoverer. (Speaking of the discoverer, with New Horizons well on the way, does anyone know whether the IAU going to go with the plan to use the Land of Oz as Charon’s feature-naming theme?)

“Caelus” is the ordinary Latin word for “sky”; the Romans generally referred to the grandfather of the Olympians as “Uranus”. The Romans didn’t exactly have the same gods as the Greeks, you see; they had gods of their own. But, like most pagans, they tended to say, “OK, alien god X is the same as our god Y.” In particular, they glommed onto the Greek gods like anything because the native Roman gods were all vague numens with no cool mythology to speak of. Where they didn’t have a clear equivalent, they kept the Greek name, Apollo being the obvious example. (By a similar process, Latin Mars-day, Mercury-day, Jupiter-day, Venus-day, and Saturn-day became Tiw’s-day, Woden’s-day, Thunor’s-day, Frija’s-day, and Saturn-day.)

We do not use the Latin pronuncation of any of the other planets, so I don’t think it can be justified in the case of Uranus.

For whatever it’s worth, I was taught “your anus” in the early 50s.

Surely Charon (Χάρων) should be “kair-own”; and Uranus (Οὐρανός) should be “oo-rai-nos”.

Actually, anemones are terrestrial flowering plants :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemone

while these resemble cartoon sea anemones :

http://sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/animals/invertebrates/seaanemone.htm

Hmm .. There may be good astronomy here but, methinks, there’s more than a little bad biology as well!

@16. Gary Ansorge :

for those into the scientific method, there’s this,,,[link snipped] .. all about actual research linking the recent increases in extreme weather to AGW. I read a few of the comments and I have to say,,,there really are a lot of idiots on the web,,,

True.

Worse yet, they’re not restricted to the internet either – there’s a lot of idiots everywhere in life generally also.

I guess we can look on the bright side & say that most of the commenters we get here are far better quality than there and elsewhere, right?

Man, I’m glad we don’t have that Uranus joke in my language. But that’s the first time I’ve heard Charon pronounced “Sharon”. Is this an alternative pronunciation, an accent thing or did she just say it wrong?

The pronunciation of Charon depends on exactly what English value one assigns to the transliteration of the Greek letter Chi (most closely resembling our letter X).

If one assigns it a hard “K” sound (as in Christmas – and that “X” in Xmas ain’t an English “X”, it’s a Greek Chi), then it sounds a bit like “Kair-on”. If one assigns it a slightly softer sound, it has no English equivalent, but would make the same kind of “Ch” sound that crops up in Scots and German (with the rest of the word sounding the same). If one assigns it a very soft sound, then it gets kind of close to “Share-on”.

I have no idea which is most widely regarded as “correct” by astronomers.

If only there were some astronomer dude around here we could ask about this . . .

@1. kuhnigget :

..If you really want to pronounce it correctly, go back to the original Greek, which would sound more like Oo-ran-ós,

Agreed & seconded by me.

Let’s go back to the original correct spelling of Ouranos too.

I’m not the only one to think so either – see :

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=189939051777

All the planets except one are named after Roman gods, and Ouranos is the one exception. Unfortunately it has become the brunt of joke after joke due to a Latinization of the original Greek name, Ouranos. We do not call Poseidon Posidon, so why make Ouranos the exception? Ouranos is a magnificent planet that has been subject to a bromidic and stale joke for far too long.

(& no, I didn’t start that facebook group myself either.)

@6. Sticks : But she called Pluto a planet, which according to the IAU, it is not!

Well the IAU got that wrong & a planet Pluto most definitely is – as are the other ice dwarf variety planets too.

Uranus is the Latinized spelling of the Greek sky-god, Ouranos or Οὐρανός. In neither Latin nor Greek is there a “you” in the name, so I don’t know why it is considered correct to have one there in English. I also don’t know why they used the Greek name, instead of the original Roman Caelus, like all the other planets.

I was in high school when the rings were in the news, so the big joke was to ask someone if it was true that there were “rings around your anus”.

and really, the most important take-home we’ve got here is arguments over pronunciation? Seriously? how about This Is A Freakin’ Awesome Way To Educate About What Science Is, And How It Works!!

sniff. sorry. I’m answering student emails on a take-home exam. ANYTHING that’s promoting critical thinking in my book can pronounce ancient, re-purposed words in any way they want.