The Sun and Moon in Indonesian

As I continue with Katla, the Indonesian version of Wordle, my latest result is shown in Figure 1. All the words shown are acceptable Indonesian words from Katla's viewpoint, even though final and viral are also words in English. The final word, hilal, I had to guess at and I choose it because I knew halal was a word and hilal was very similar. A quick check using Google Translate returned the meaning "new moon". I thought I'd investigate further.

Figure 1

To my surprise, the word didn't appear at all in my Indonesian dictionary that I have sitting on the hard drive of my laptop as a PDF. However, there was an entry in the Indonesian Wikipedia that states:

Hilal adalah bulan sabit muda pertama yang dapat dilihat setelah terjadinya konjungsi (ijtimak, bulan baru) pada arah dekat matahari terbenam yang menjadi acuan permulaan bulan dalam kalender Islam. Biasanya hilal diamati pada hari ke-29 dari bulan Islam untuk menentukan apakah hari berikutnya sudah terjadi pergantian bulan atau belum. Hilal juga merupakan bagian dari fase – fase bulan.

Google Translate renders this as: 

Hilal is the first young crescent that can be seen after conjunction (ijtimak, new moon) in the direction near sunset which is a reference to the beginning of the month in the Islamic calendar. Usually the new moon is observed on the 29th day of the Islamic month to determine whether the following day has taken place or not. The new moon is also part of the moon phases.

The sighting of this new moon is most important in determining the start of Ramadan. This realisation of what hilal meant motivated me to look at some other astronomical terms. One that I'm familiar with is "solar system" that translates as tata surya which is surprising because the word for "sun" is matahari, the eye in the sky. Why is surya used instead? 

I put the following question to ChatGPT:

Why do Indonesians use the word "surya" to refer to the sun when used in the phrase "tata surya" or solar system? The normal word for the Sun in Indonesian is "matahari".

It thought about it for a good while and then provided this quite reasonable response:

The word "surya" is derived from Sanskrit and is commonly used in Indonesia to refer to the Sun in certain cultural and religious contexts. "Tata Surya" literally means "system of the Sun" and refers to the solar system. The use of the term "surya" emphasizes the importance and significance of the Sun in ancient Hindu-Buddhist belief systems that have influenced Indonesian culture. 

The word for the Moon of course in bulan but this word also means "month" which is not surprising as the Islamic world uses a lunar calendar and not a solar one. Thus the Moon marks the months. The phases of the Moon are as follows:

• bulan sabit - crescent moon (sabit means "sickle")
  
  
• bulan bungkuk - gibbous moon (bungkuk means "hunchback")
  
  
• bulan purnama - full moon (or purnama can be used by itself)
  
  
• gerhana matahari - solar eclipse (gerhana means "eclipse")
  
  
• gerhana bulan - lunar eclipse
  
  
• gerhana cincin - annular eclipse (cincin means "ring")

That will do it for this post.