The name of the planet Altai means "Golden." The name of its sun, Krasna, means "Red."
Krasna is a Slavic word meaning "red" or "beautiful". (Comparable to Sanskrit Kṛṣṇa or Karṣṇa which means "black", "dark" or "handsome").
-copied from here.
As I thought, "Krasna" is related to "Krishna." (For Krishna on this blog, see here.) Despite his name, Krishna is represented as blue. His name is not linguistically related to the royal/religious title, "Christ," meaning "Anointed." There is a fictional planet called "Krishna" but it is in a series by L. Sprague de Camp which I have not read.
I think that that exhausts the topic of these planetary names.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I remember how the Alfzarian captain Flandry was conversing with at the beginning of "A Message in Secret" commented that Krasna must have seemed depressingly dark to the first colonists on Altai, humans used to bright, yellow white Sol. And Flandry said Krasna was not truly red, more of an orange/yellow color.
I have read some of L. Sprague De Camp's "Viagens Interplanetarias" stories. I thought them fun to read!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
That statue of Krishna was painted in what looks like a light, grayish blue. Which, if anything, reminded me of the blue skinned Alfzarians!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
In a comic by Alan Moore, a blue-skinned superhero from a parallel universe runs through the Godz Bar. Someone (I think it is the Old Testament deity) asks, "Friend of yous, Krish?" Krishna replies, "You think all us blue guys know each other?"
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Ha! Well, I thought it was natural to think of the Alfzarians!
And, of course, there's the blue skinned Wersgor we see in Anderson's THE HIGH CRUSADE.
Ad astra! Sean
Sanskrit (and its descendants like Hindi) are fairly closely related to Slavic (and its subsets, like Russian).
They're both Indo-European, and more than that they both went through a set of sound-changes which go by the name of "satemization", after the word for "one hundred". In PIE, that's "kmtom", which gives Latin "centum" and Germanic *hundaradą (via another sound-shift which turns intial "k" to "h").
The Slavic languages and the related Baltic ones were on the extreme western fringe of the "satem" zone.
A Lithuanian-speaker I knew in high school could read chunks of the Vedas without any special instructions; Lithuanian, which is extremely conservative, is close enough to Sanskrit(*) for that.
(*) Sanskrit isn't a conservative language -- quite the contrary. But it is very -old-, probably dating as a spoken vernacular to around 1500 BCE.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I always read your comments about languages with interest, even if I generally know too little to adequately comment.
I am a bit surprised the Lithuanian you knew could read parts of the Vedas in Sanskrit. After their conversion to Catholic Christianity around AD 1390, the Lithuanians adopted the Roman alphabet for their language. And since Lithuanian and Sanskrit both use different alphabets, I thought it would be difficult for persons familiar with only one of them to read the other.
Ad astra! Sean
It was a Roman-alphabet version of the Vedas; there are conventions that give phonetic equivalents. Incidentally, the Vedas were composed quite a long time before they were written down; Indians developed quite a sophisticated system of linguistics and grammar so that Sanskrit could be learned by speakers of the Prakrits, the daughter-languages, and they recorded both the grammar and sound-system of Sanskrit and so preserved it. Modern linguists can trace the differences (subtle ones) between the earlier Vedas, which were composed by native speakers, and later ones to whose authors Sanskrit was a ‘learned’ language, a liturgical tongue like Medieval Latin.
Incidentally, when Sanskrit was a spoken language in 1500 BCE, the Proto-Baltic-Slavic ancestral to modern Lithuanian was only weakly different from PIE itself; Sanskrit had changed more.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That resolves my puzzlement: a Roman alphabet version of the Vedas. And I'm not surprised at least parts of the Vedas were composed and transmitted orally before being written down. The Homeric poems probably originated as orally transmitted texts before being copied down.
Ad astra! Sean
Oral cultures often have elaborate mnemonic devices for preserving their “literature”.
For example, the Homeric poems are Iron Age in date, but they preserve details of Bronze Age weapons, dress, and institutions - bronze weapons, boar-tusk helmets, big figure-eight shields. Kings are called “Annax”, which is a reflex of “Wannax”, the Mycenaean term. In Homer’s day, the word for a king was “Basilieus”, which in Mycenaean times meant “village chief”, more or less. It even preserves a muddled memory of literacy where the plot demands it (a sealed message reading ‘please execute bearer’) whereas the Homeric Age Greeks had lost even 5he concept - their descendants borrowed an alphabet from the Phoenicians.
Many of the cities mentioned in the Homeric “catalogue of ships” hadn’t existed for centuries.
And there are bits from even earlier. There’s a Homeric epithet, “hieron menos”, ‘holy and powerful’, which has a direct cognate in the Vedas, ‘Ishiram manas’. That’s the same words, just with a different set of sound-shifts.
That means it was already a poetic standard phrase when the ancestors of Greek and Sanskrit parted company, which would have been somewhere between 3000 and 2500 BCE. — up to two thousand years before Homer.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I do remember, from the translation of Homer I read, high status bronze weapons and armor.
Jerry Pournelle, in his JANISSARIES books set on the planet Tran, has as one of the societies there, a feudal culture descended from Bronze Age Mycenaeans. The title of the King of Drantos was "Wanax" in their language. A nice realistic touch!
Ad astra! Sean
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