चाँद को! چاند كو! ਚੰਨ ਨੂੰ!

[muckefuck]

When I saw that the Indians had named their lunar satellite चंद्रयान-1 Chandrayaan-1, I was immediately curious what the name meant. The first element, चंद्र chandra, was immediately familiar as a Sanskritic word for "moon" and I thought यान yaan might be some kind of tatsama derivational ending. Sadly--as the "1" at the end should've tipped me off--it's even more prosaic than that: "Moon-vehicle". The yaan is the yāna of familiar Buddhist terms like Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna.

LAME! I mean, c'mon people! How many cultures have a richer cosmic mythology than Hinduism? They couldn't find anything in the legends of the lunar deity Chandra to furnish a more interesting name than that?

Comments

[grahamwest.livejournal.com]

Engineers tend to be a prosaic lot. Other organisations have done the same thing, witness Lunar Orbiter 1 and SMART 1. The people that seem to choose the most unusual names are the Japanese, who have a policy of not picking (or at least not announcing/using) a real name for a spacecraft until it makes it into space successfully.

[oh-meow.livejournal.com]

The UK's one a few years ago that was basically made by some people in a shed was called Beagle II after Darwin's boat

[oh-meow.livejournal.com]

Oh and it had music composed by Blur on it too.