QUESTION:
Where did the word "sun" come from?

ANSWER from Dave Cole on 12 November 1995:
Well, "sun" is a word that's been around for a very long time, certainly
from well before the Middle Ages.  This is really a question you should
ask a linguist, someone who studies the history of words, rather than an
astronomer, but I'll give it my best shot!  According to my dictionary,
our word "sun" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "sunne", which in turn comes
from the old High German word "sunna".  That means it's a word which
English inherited from the ancient Germanic languages, which go back to
before recorded history.

English is mostly a Germanic language, but it also has lots of words
which came from Latin.  Most of our names for the days of the week come
from old German: Sun day, Moon day, Tiw's day, Woden's day, Thor's day,
and Freya's day.  Woden, Tiu, Thor, and Freya are all the names of Norse
gods.  The one oddball is Saturn's day, which comes from Latin; in Roman
mythology, Saturn was the god of agriculture.

ANSWER from Bob Loewenstein on October 31, 1995:
Do you have a dictionary? I wonder if it agrees with my dictionary
which says that 'sun' comes from Middle English 'sunne' or sonne'.

ANSWER from Sean Colgan on November, 1995:
Not my area of expertise - I think we need a etymologist for this one,
since it was called the sun long before scientists studied it.