Monday, April 04, 2005

HEBREW ON MARS! Sumerian and Mayan too. This article ("Indian mark on Mars") in the Calcutta Telegraph drew my attention to this story. It seems that the two Rovers of Nasa's current Mars Exploration Rover Mission are each equipped with a "sundial" on which the word for "Mars" is inscribed in two dozen languages. I take the full list from an old but informative Cornell News report of a press conference by PBS's "Bill Nye The Science Guy":
Appropriately for a science instrument involving Nye, the sundial design evolved through suggestions and drawings from children across the United States, solicited by Sheri Klug, director of Arizona State University's Mars Education and Outreach Program.

[...]

One idea suggested by children was that the sundial bear writing in many languages, representing the diverse cultures of Earth. The face of the sundial is engraved with the word "Mars" in Arabic, Bengali, Braille, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Inuktituk, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lingala, Malay-Indonesian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. Together these languages are used by more than three quarters of Earth's population. Also included are ancient Sumerian and Mayan. Mars figured prominently in both the Sumerian and Mayan cultures.

Cool, but too bad they left out Aramaic.

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