Does anybody know?

Wow. Thanks for the info. I'll definitely be sharing this with my Zodiac group. 😊😉👍

Any time :)

I don't get it either... People still call their god Jahwe or Jehova even though that literally only means "god". It's not a name but through not translating it long enough it became one. Same goes for the zodiac signs. In Germany we also have the translated "Löwe", "Zwillinge", "Fische", "Waage",.... But English speaking people seem to keep Latin names more often than not... 🤷

The only one I knew in German is Jungfrau (Virgo). And it has come to my attention before that a lot of English speakers don't even know what the Latin names actually mean. And the reason why I know they are mispronounced in English is because my cousin told me the Latin pronunciation rules.

For example "cancer" in in Latin pronounced as "Kank - er"... Which is also how the disease is pronounced in many languages, but the name of the disease and the zodiac sign have the same origin, which is the reference to the animal crab. The first tumor spot was said to look like a crab, hence the name of the disease. (The logo of the Dutch foundation fighting cancer (Koningin Wilhelmina Fonds) is even a crab with a sword stabbed through it, which is quite symbolic, don't you think).

Although astrology is not officially recognized as a form of science (knowledge about space is called astronomy... one letter difference, but a complete different thing), I could understand Latin names could be used internationally (like they use latin names for organs in medical science and latin names for animals and plants in biology), but in the communication of speaking to the common folk this was a bit beyond me. I mean when speaking of my organs, I still say my heart and not of my cor meum. It always seemed a bit odd to me.

Well... we can't really ask any native Latin speakers today so there's still debate on how exactly the pronunciation worked originally. But it's pretty much agreed upon that the "English pronunciation" isn't it. 😅

Like I said, for some reason Latin words have made it into the modern English language more often than in most other languages, at least in the US. Not only in astrology terms but a lot of medical names as well. Just take "cancer" as an example. Or the "glutes" (as in "glutes of steel" for a very firm butt) coming from the medical term "gluteus maximus"... Sometimes I use English when I don't remember the Latin name for something because they seem to just go with the scientific description more often than not. Might be a by-product of English being a fairly new language and a lot of medical terms already existed and were incorporated. In older languages there already was a word for it before it got standardized with Latin. But that's just my theory. 🤷

I don't really know how old or young English is. I've heard many claims about it. Even the claim that everybody who speaks it must die because it's the language of infidels, but since that claim came from Osama Bin Laden, I guess we shouldn't take that one too seriously. I mean the fact that contrary to Dutch and German where the spelling mostly tells how to say something, English is always guessing work, and a linguist who has a channel about many languages on YouTube said that many languages have had many spelling adaptions over time where English had not. I can only confirm that the last spelling adaption I know about in Dutch was about 20 years ago or so, and the language spelling rules were completely revised shortly after WWII so we often speak of text from "before the war" and of "after the war". I can't speak for other languages,though.

Finding native Latin speakers will indeed be hard. There is only one country where Latin is the official language, which would be Vatican City. But if we can compare that with how Latin was spoken by the Romans. They told me the same discussion came around when Hebrew was chosen as the language for Israel, since before Israel was formed Hebrew wasn't spoken for more than a thousand years, so how could we be sure about its pronunciation since no recordings of how it was spoken in the past exist.