Why doesn’t the earth’s moon have a name?
BUT it has: its name is “Moon”. Every natural satellite is identified with a mythical figure. Jupiter’s 16 moons, for example, bear the names of women (and a man: Ganymede) with most of whom this remarkable god was supposed to have had love affairs. Earth’s moon, the longest known of all, was given the name “Selene” by the Greeks and “Luna” by the Romans, each a goddess. The ancient Germans called it “Man” or “Mani” and had a myth about a miserable person of this name who, together with his sister (the sun), is being pursued by a hound across the skies until the end of the world. From this myth derive the Germanic words “mane” (Danish), “maan” (Dutch), “moon” (English) and “mond” (German), later transferred to all celestial bodies circulating around.
With respect, some nomenclature needs clearing up. “Moon” is not the name of earth’s satellite, as is signalled by the lack of a capital initial. “Moon” is a label, like “person”. The formal term for a person is “human being” (for “moon”, read “satellite”). Would you like to be introduced to someone as “a person”? Or, indeed, as “a human being”?No, the moon has a name. Several in fact. Arabic calls the moon “Merenda” (hence the girl’s name “Miranda”). Malay calls it “Bulan”. The moon’s name – in the West’s ancient and venerable planetary naming system – is “Selene”. It’s incorrect to talk of the moon’s “Geology” – it’s “Selenology” (this is no whimsy – NASA employs several Selenographers, and their Areologists are busy examining the surface of Mars). A similar error would be to ask why the earth doesn’t have a name, when every other planet is named after a God/dess. Earth’s name is Gaia, which has recently been revived (thanks, largely, to Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis”).