Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
Neither do I? I never said it would be confusing as to what Luna referred to. I did say using Luna in English gives the impression that the Moon' s name is Luna (which, in English, is not the case). Was that what you were thinking of?
Ah, I see. Our disagreement is whether the IAU defined name matters. You seem to regard it as important that people have no confusion as to what the IAU says to call it in it's style guides, while I do not. When you said it might be confusing, you meant that people might get the idea that Luna was part of the IAU style guide, not confusion around the underlying object being referred to. The question then is why you think the IAU style is important?

Personally I think it is objectively bad, so am pretty quick to disregard it. It opts into a genericization with no good reason. When we say 'the moon', or 'the solar system', it is usually clear from context that we mean our one, even in IAU publications. It doesn't add anything to the language making that their name. Any time 'the moon' might be referring to a different moon you probably should be using 'Earth's moon' anyway and not just capitalising it! Names exist to disambiguate between objects that otherwise cannot be distinguished by type. The name 'Moon' singularly fails at this to the point we need to resort to another identifier.

I have little problem with calling it 'The Moon' (for now), unless you are going to insist that it must have only one name. Then it is a poor choice for any communication where you might be talking about the moon in the context of other moons. When talking about space, and near future colonisation in particular, that comes up. In this conversation about naming of astronomical objects, moons might be brought up. Diverging from the IAU in the name of increased clarity is appropriate here, despite the value of convention.