[tlhIngan Hol] moon ph(r)ases, new adverbial {loQHa'}

[Will Martin]

We are arguing less about the meaning of the phases of the Moon than about the nature of the word “arbitrary”. My dictionary says, “based on choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.” History has arbitrarily frozen terms concerning the Moon phases at different times for different reasons. I’m not saying that each person talking about the Moon has arbitrary terms. I’m saying that English speaking humanity didn’t follow any reason or system when they picked which words they would apply to the different phases of the Moon. They just arbitrarily picked a term based on one reason and agreed on it, and that term froze, and later they picked a different term for another phase based on some completely different reason, not systematic to the first term, and agreed to freeze the term to that new one, and over time, they collected the terms we use for Moon phases.

The terms describe a system, but the terms were not systematically chosen. “New” and “Quarter” share a system that “Full” ignores. “Waxing” and “Waning” are more consistent with “Full” than they are with “New” and “Quarter”. And “Gibbous?” Where TF did “Gibbous” come from?

Consider that some of the people in this discussion have replaced the term “Quarter Moon” with “Crescent Moon”, when the current meanings of these terms as I understand them are different.

The Quarter Moon is the description of two phases of the Moon between a New Moon and a half-illuminated Moon. 

And it gets weirder, because the New Moon seems to be of arbitrary duration from a specific instant at the middle of the time it is not illuminated, or as long as it is not illuminated, which is vague because there isn’t really a reliably clocked instant when “AHA! THERE IT IS! THE FIRST SPECK OF ILLUMINATION! THE NEW MOON IS OVER AND IT IS NOW A WAXING QUARTER!” Meanwhile, the Moon Phase app on my Apple Watch gives the New Moon to the day, when more than a day away, and to the hour on the day of the New Moon. I get it, but this is weird.

If there’s a thin sliver of illumination, it’s a Quarter Moon. If it’s exactly half illuminated, some might call it a Quarter Moon, or some might call it a Gibbous Moon. We don’t really have a term for the exactly half-illuminated Moon. The half-illuminated Moon is the cusp between the Quarter Moon and the Gibbous Moon. The Gibbous Moon is to the Full Moon as the Quarter Moon is to the New Moon.

Waxing and Waning are terms added to Quarter and Gibbous to tell us whether the illuminated part is getting bigger or smaller; whether we’re headed toward a Full Moon or a New Moon next.

That’s the terminology used by every Moon phase tracking app I’ve ever used.

The Crescent Moon has become a description of an appearance of the Moon, separate from any time-tracking of its phases. It refers to Moon that is partially illuminated, but closer to a New Moon than to a Full Moon. The shape has a concave arc and a convex arc. It’s thickest in the middle, thinning out to points at the end. Interestingly, it’s usually depicted as a roughly 1/4 illuminated Moon (measured as at the equator, 3/4 of the Moon is dark, and 1/4 is illuminated).

One thing about Earth’s Moon that affects phases that may or may not be true of Praxis is that the Moon and Sun are visually the same size to people on Earth, and the Earth’s shadow on the Moon during an eclipse is roughly the same size as the Moon. Praxis might never line up with Kronos’s home star to have either kind of eclipse, or if it does, a lunar eclipse might look like a donut, or might be eclipsed for days. Their solar eclipse might be barely noticeable as a slightly dimmed home star, or it might create total darkness across the entire planet for hours.

Then again, the Earth’s Moon has the same side facing the Earth at all times, so the only change we have in the appearance of the Moon is the phase based on changes of illumination. Praxis might rotate so that Klingons see different parts of Praxis on different days. These might be recognizably different such that Klingon months would be based on which area of Praxis is facing them instead of which parts of it are illuminated, and this might vary, like Time Zones depending on the observer’s longitude on Kronos. This would be especially true if Praxis were to orbit Kronos tangential to Kronos’s orbit around the home star, since half of Praxis would always be illuminated. There would be no lunar illumination phase.

“Is there air? We don’t know!"

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




> On May 28, 2022, at 9:58 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 5/28/2022 9:25 PM, De'vID wrote:
>> The lunar phases were not all named at once, but at different points in history.
> The English terms full moon and new moon go way back, to Old English and perhaps beyond. The others began to be used in English in about the 15th century.
> 
> 
> 
>> Then the "crescent moon" is named for its shape (but whether it's a "sickle" [Sichel in German] or an "eyebrow" [眉 in Chinese] or something else is arbitrary).
> The word crescent being used here isn't arbitrary. It comes from Latin luna crescens, where it meant "waxing moon." The Latin word that became crescent originally meant to get bigger (compare crescendo), to wax. Linking the word crescent to a shape came later because it was being used of the moon. So the term crescent moon doesn't come from its shape; the name of the shape comes from the waxing moon.
> 
> All of these terms have histories and reasons for being the way they are. Having diverse sources isn't arbitrariness.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
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