[70/365] Máaz

[cosmolinguist]

The first scientific focus of NASA’s Perseverance rover is a rock named “Máaz” – the Navajo word for “Mars.” The rover’s team, in collaboration with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President, has been naming features of scientific interest with words in the Navajo language.
...
Mission scientists worked with a Navajo (or Diné) engineer on the team, Aaron Yazzie of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, to seek the Navajo Nation’s permission and collaboration in naming new features on Mars.
...
one suggestion was “tséwózí bee hazhmeezh,” or “rolling rows of pebbles, like waves.” Yazzie added suggestions like “strength” (“bidziil”) and “respect” (“hoł nilį́”) to the list. Perseverance itself was translated to “Ha’ahóni.”

Here's the link.

From a linguistic perspective, I'm really curious how viable "naming stuff on another planet" is as a language revitalization plan or policy! And it's sad but unsurprising that Perseverance can't deal with the accented characters necessary to spell Diné words properly, a problem that befalls almost all the world's languages except the one the internet is written in (on that subject, here's an interesting article I read the other day about how that problem is playing out for Urdu script).

Comments

[ivy]

I am so glad that they're looking for collaboration! I have a bilingual Irish/English poetry series about the features on Venus named after Irish goddesses, and some of them I'm all I WISH YOU HAD TALKED TO AN IRISH PERSON BEFORE DOING THIS BUT OKAY, heh. (I went through and dug up all their cites from the times of feature naming, and some of them are... when you are citing a non-academic book written by an American Pagan through Llewellyn for the names of Irish goddesses... um.) So it's awesome that they are trying to do better than that now. And yeah, they absolutely left off all the fadas in the Irish names.

[silveradept]

These are very interesting and informative. I had thought Unicode was doing a decent job of rendering glyphs and scripts, but I can see where language rules that seem to be much more "aesthetically pleasing and conveys the meaning" would be merry hell for computers to try and render, since it doesn't seem like there are specific rules to follow.