smittythehoneybadger t1_ir4ysr2 wrote on October 5, 2022 at 11:37 AM

Reply to comment by smittythehoneybadger in Hercules statue, approximately 2,000 years old, discovered in Greece - The Jerusalem Post by DRKILLM0NGER

I apologize for confusion, I didn’t mean it in that the Greeks spoke Latin so much as that if a Latin speaking artist sculpted it, would we not use his terms? I know the two are essentially the same, but wouldn’t the distinction matter? Or did they recognize that Ares and Mars were the same entity?

dumbidoo t1_ir55jzm wrote on October 5, 2022 at 12:40 PM

This is just some dumb reasoning. If an American went to Finland and made a statue of Santa Claus there, complete with a name plate referring to it as such, at least 99% of Finnish people would still refer to it as Joulupukki (the Finnish word for Santa Claus), because that's their name for the character and has been for longer than America has existed as a country in its current state. You will pretty much never change people's use of a word like that when they've already been using their own word for them for centuries. If the creation was an original, sure, they would probably respect the foreign name enough to at least try and pronounce it, but they're not going to stop using a name they've been using forever for the newer, foreign version. Especially so in the case of Herakles which is originally a Greek creation in the first place.