> The term sol is used by planetary scientists to refer to the duration of a solar day on Mars. The term was adopted during the Viking project in order to avoid confusion with an Earth day. By inference, Mars' "solar hour" is 1/24 of a sol, and a solar minute 1/60 of a solar hour.
I wish they would have picked another name. As a Spanish speaker, I can't stop my mind translating "sol" to "sun". I can already imagine hearing someone say, "how was your sun today?"
That may have actually been (slightly?) intentional. When talking about our Sun in the greater context of stars, I've often seen it referred to as "Sol". The best immediate example I have are games like Stellaris or Elite: Dangerous which refer to our home system as the "Sol System" and our star as "Sol", but I recall hearing it in non-sci-fi contexts as well.
I'm not really sure how the etymology works out on all of that, though.
If you call it something more verbose like <x>ian day, people are just gonna shorten it in conversation to "day" and then you end up with confusing ambiguities.
You have to know your mythology well to understand that.
Tyr was the Norse god of war, so equivalent to Mars.
Wotan was an old name for Odin, who started as the messenger of the gods, like Mercury. (The connection was clearer when Tacitus was comparing German and Roman mythologies than in current Norse myths.)
Thor was the god of thunder, like Jupiter.
Frey and Freya were god and goddess of fertility, so parallel Venus.
English already has the same names. Wednesday is Woden's day. Thursday is Thor's Day, Friday is Frigg's day. These are just English translations of the planets associated with the gods.
The names of the days of the week are fairly uniform on Earth. Monday (Moon-day) = lunes (spanish) = 月曜日 (japanese - getsuyoubi, moon day). Sunday = 日曜日 (sunday, or almost "sun sun"). These came through China and are very old names -- tying the seven objects you can see move against the background stars (ignoring Uranus if you know where to look) is an idea going back the the classical era.
> These came through China and are very old names -- tying the seven objects you can see move against the background stars (ignoring Uranus if you know where to look) is an idea going back the the classical era.
Well, the Japanese weekday names come to Japanese through China. They don't originate there; the fact that they occur in the same order as the Western days of the week strongly suggests that they didn't develop independently.
The native (old) Chinese system divides months into three roughly equal 旬 periods; seven-day weeks aren't part of it.
I wish they would have picked another name. As a Spanish speaker, I can't stop my mind translating "sol" to "sun". I can already imagine hearing someone say, "how was your sun today?"