Thanks Nico for the nice explanation, well done!
Yes, the company Es'hailSat and there satellite fleet are named after Canopus.
Es'hail 2 will be launched in first quarter 2017.
73s Peter DB2OS
Am 11. Juni 2016 17:17:51 MESZ, schrieb Nico Janssen [email protected]:
Recently we see many postings about the new satellite called "Es'hail 2". Maybe you also wondered what the meaning is of "Es'hail". I asked two 'friendly Arabic speaking colleagues' to fill me in.
It appears the satellite is named after a star, that we know as Canopus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus In Arabic, Canopus is Sohail. But in the section 'Middle East' on the Wiki page you see that there are many variants for this name, including Sohayl, Soheil, Suhayl, Suheyl, etc.
Actually the name of our satellite is 'The Canopus', or in Arabic 'El Sohail'. In Arabic they tend to merge the two words, so it would become 'ElSohail'. Since Arabs find it hard to pronounce the combination of l and s, they drop the l. So it becomes 'ESohail'. An apostrophe is added to emphasize the S: 'ES'ohail'. And since the o (or u) will be pronounced anyway, almost 'automatically', it may be dropped. So that is how we get 'ES'hail', or even 'Es'hail'.
As for the pronunciation of this satellite's name, probably 'eSohayl' is best, with a short and soft e at the beginning.
So now at least we know what we are talking about :-)
73, Nico PA0DLO
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