Board Thread:Board Room/@comment-6192698-20131202024326/@comment-6191693-20131207060254

...What was wrong with Fengari? I forget where I got that name...but I do agree it's not the best we can do.

But we do need some sort of designation to distinguish it from other planets' moons, as well as from our own moon. "The moon" is fine in normal speech among characters (as in RL), but I feel we need a more scientific name for it, sort of like the way our RL moon takes its name from the Latin Luna. IRL, a less-common and mostly-archaic adjective referring to the moon is "Selenic," from the Greek "Selene," instead of the much-more-common "Lunar," from the Latin "Luna." What if we called it "Selos" and used the adjective "selic" when describing it? Much more natural-sounding and has a grounding in real life.

As far as naming the other planets goes, I disagree with Servoth. IRL, celestial bodies were named after Roman mythology until the last 200 years or so, when we began to favor the discoverer's surnames instead. Why Roman mythology? Because Latin was the lingua franca. Now, translating this to the Vaporverse, why would we name the planets that people have known about for tens of thousands of years after cites and nations that are, at best, only a few hundred or thousand years old? It's just entirely illogical and nonsensical.

We could go with whatever we decide our historical lingua franca to be, which, with the prevalence of the Rothian Catholic Church and the Gratian Empire, which would be Latin. Now, we could stick with the Latin language but avoid the Roman mythology we're so familiar with by choosing other Latin-influenced names (possibly based in our own mythology or by simply choosing different gods/heroes), or we can just do the old "use Greek instead" trick and call them Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, Cronus, Poseidon, Caelus, and Hades.

Fun Fact: Uranus is the only RL planet names after a Greek god instead of a Roman one; Caelus is his Roman equivalent.

Also, Pluto is also a Greek god, but it's not really a planet anymore, so Uranus is all on his lonesome now. Actually, Hades is also Greek; his Roman name is Dis Pater. They probably went with Pluto because Hades sounds so ominous and Dis Pater sounds so silly. That's just my guess, though.