Just a short one this week since
these posts have been getting pretty long lately.
Sun
The word sun comes from the Old English sunne, which means sun.
As you can see, it had more letters back then, as well as a slightly different
pronunciation (it would have been more like sunny). Plus because of how Old
English works it would have been a feminine word, which I just like. It comes
from the Proto
Germanic sunnon, which can be traced
back to the Proto Indo
European sawel-, the sun.
Solar
Solar showed up in the mid fifteenth century, which means it probably came
after sun did. It’s from the classical
Latin solaris (solar),
from sol (sun),
which happens to also be from sawel-. So solar and sun happen to be from the
same place, just by completely different routes.
Helio-
Helio- is a prefix we use to things
related to the sun, like heliocentric, or the astronomical words anthelion and
aphelion. It’s also related to the plant heliotrope and the gas helium.
Helio is from Helios, the Greek sun god and is yet another word
descended from sawel-. No, I don’t know where the S went.
TL;DR: the old word for sun is
everywhere because the sun is pretty important and it makes sense that the word
for it wouldn’t change much.
Sources
Tony Jebson’s
page on the Origins of
Old English
