Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that might not be related but I found fascinating is that Jupiter is “木星” in Chinese, where “木” means wooden. The first time “木星” was mentioned in Chinese literature was in 东汉, year 25 - year 220 (around 1800 years ago). So Chinese people back then thought the planet was made of wood! And as a child, this planet has the name easiest to remember, because it looks exactly like a wooden ball.

Edit: I digged deeper and found that it was a coincidence that Jupiter was called the Wooden Planet. The Chinese assigned the name not because they were able to observe the wood like texture (due to the lack of telescope), but they were able to observe the existence of the planet with naked eye as early as 2300 years ago, along with the Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn. These five planets were assigned to the name in the order of "金 gold (Venus)","木 wood (Jupiter)","水 water (Mercury)","火 fire (Mars)"."土 rock (Saturn)" superstitiously. What's really surprising is Venus does look like gold in color and Saturn does look like wood in color. What a coincidence!

I'm pretty sure the ancient Chinese could see the colors of at least some of the planets. You don't need a telescope to tell that one celestial object looks redder than another, especially if you have good eyesight and no light pollution.

Venus is indeed golden; Jupiter is red-brown like some type of wood; Saturn looks like it's covered in sand (土 can mean dirt as well as rock, and there's a lot of yellow dirt in China); Mars is unmistakably red; and Mercury looks plain white so why not assign it to the only remaining element. Four correct guesses out of five = probably not a coincidence.

White is also prominently used to mean clear, clean water in hydronyms (there's the german city weisswasser, for example).

Not an interesting coincidence. Jupiter is hot but Mars gets named fire. Mercury looks like rock (thin atmosphere) but Saturn get called rock. You could find some reason to make almost any naming seem like a coincidence.

Not interesting to who? Coincidences can interesting even if they don't point to a causal relationship. I find it interesting that word for Jupiter in Chinese is wood simply because it's an interesting association to make.

Mars at least probably isn't a coincidence, in terms of the element assigned, since it's visibly red to the naked eye.

Not knowing Chinese, I also had to look up '星', as parent comment does not explain it. It means planet, so literally 'Wooden Planet'. Nice.

It can also mean star, it’s pretty general for various astronomical bodies. You can also see it used in the word satellite (卫星), shooting star (流星), etc. gotta love Chinese :)

And in these 5 planets and associated elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Xing rooted a large number of traditional beliefs: Feng Shui, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Martial Arts.

And arguably stunted progression from them. But that's getting off topic.

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