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To your question, no not entirely anyway. Other cultures might have traditional names for the visible stars and planets, but the heavenly bodies that were discovered by telescope basically just have the names they were given by their discoverers.

For example in Japanese, the visible planets have names that align with their own pre-Columbian traditions, e.g. Mars is named "Kasei" which means Firestar and Jupiter is named "Mokusei" which means Treestar. But when you get to planets discovered in modern times, Uranus, Neptune and demoted Pluto, they're respectively "Tennousei (Heavenly-King Star)", "Kaiousei (Sea-King Star)", and "Meiousei (Hades-King Star)", which are directly derived from the Western names given by their discoverers.

Now imagine the thousands of smaller named bodies in the Solar System, nobody's going to be bothered to come up with independent names for all of them for every culture, it would be too confusing. Imagine if everyone used native-tongue keywords in programming languages. Someone would send you a Python progam in French and it would be littered with sinon, sauf, Vrai, etc. While it might be convenient for the native speaker working alone, it would be a nightmare for interoperability.

Thus, newly discovered heavently bodies are referred to by the designations approved by the International Astronomical Union, in this case via its Working Group - Small Bodies Nomenclature.



> Someone would send you a Python progam in French and it would be littered with sinon, sauf, Vrai, etc. While it might be convenient for the native speaker working alone, it would be a nightmare for interoperability.

When you think about it, would it actually matter?

The AST would be the same. As long as identifiers are defined for multiple locales it would be trivial to translate.


The only language I know of that's tried this is AppleScript. Otherwise this makes it too hard to read sample code/documentation, and MTL isn't good at translating keywords consistently.




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