Jupiter Named After Sky God
This past summer, Post Time ran a seven-part series on how Palm Beach County’s municipalities were named and solicited responses from anyone with a different version.
That prompted the following clarification from loyal reader Charles J. Milhauser, a retired college professor and a volunteer at the Loxahatchee River Historical Society, about the entry on Jupiter:
“The name Jupiter appears on English maps of the area as early as 1770, seven years after England acquired Florida; the name was not given by ‘English settlers arriving in the 1880s.’ Jupiter was the name of a sky god of the Latin peoples in prehistoric times, long before the Romans of a much later period became familiar with Greek literature and culture, and began drawing comparisons based on similarities between the gods and goddesses of Greece and the divinities of Rome. Jupiter was never ‘the more common Latin name for Zeus.’
“Also, you left out a step, the leap from Hobe to Jove. The Spanish heard the name of the village as HO-bay, as you stated, but spelled it Jobe/Jove. Spanish “h” is silent, and the closest approximation of the initial sound was their letter “j.” This resulted in the spelling Jobe/Jove (“b” and “v” sound the same to Spanish ears and are interchangeable in the spelling of many words). The English mistook Jove for the name of the Roman god and understood it either as an informal variant of Jupiter (as in the exclamation “by Jove”)
or as the ablative case of the god’s Latin name. Latin students are trained when translating into English to use the nominative case, hence Juppiter/Jupiter rather than Jove.”
Loxahatchee River Historical Society: (561) 747-6639. Web: www.lrhs.org.
Tags: place names
