Reading with my kids in two languages gives me a new appreciation for words and their origins.

We looked at the names of the planets in Chinese. Mercury through Saturn has carries the names of the 5 elements. "Water star" = Mercury etc.

Then Uranus and Neptune are Sky Lord Star, and Ocean Lord Star respectively. Which matches with the Greek god theme.

So I suspected that the first 5 were named independently pre lots of interaction between East and West and the last two, logically, were discovered much later and named in after some level of discourse with each other.

I shared this observation with family at breakfast and that led into discussion about how they justified heliocentricity with epicycles.

I really hope these random conversations gets them interested into the historical aspect of things. I find it so interesting. We looked up discovery dates of the planets even.

May your long weekend be filled with random!