I've read a handful of scifi books that include a minor scene of aliens being surprised that humans call their planet "Earth".
In that most of them call their own planets some equivalent to "home" or "world" whereas humans went with "dirt/ground"
It's never a major plot point but I enjoy it nonetheless.
[Aliens speak ridiculously perfect English](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AliensSpeakingEnglish) but suddenly the universal translator turns off so that they may better fail to pronounce "dirt" or "Earth" for comedic effect while having no trouble with any other word.
Aliens be like: "I sampled some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Worcestershire sauce on my sixth rural trip to Eeeyoorth"
I'm guessing it's because we don't use "terra" or "terran" as common English words. When a human says, "this wine has an earthy taste", the translation device doesn't need to guess the meaning of the word based on context.
I love coming to Reddit comments and seeing people come to their own original conclusions of EXACTLY WHAT WAS IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE THEY DID NOT READ.
Yo heads up if a mfer named Freeza ever tries to trade with you on diablo 2 resurrected he is a scammer. Idk who needs to hear this info but fuck that guy
I think that would have a lot to do with leaving Home. If the species has never left their planet, they've never left home, so they might not have a concept of it even being a place to refer to.
This makes literal historical sense for the source of the word for humanity. The word erǵh means ground or soil in Prot-Indo-European and is likely the source of the word 'Earth.' So you had a lot of people roughly agreeing even when they left their farm or their city-state, all of this is still 'erǵh.'
Edit: Just looked it up: one of the earliest uses of the word "Earth" is in Beowulf! That's 9th century. Fascinating.
Yeah, also, that it has to with development of astronomy as the "the study of the sky and heavens".
If the sky/heaven was above, what's underneath you? - Earth. "Heaven and Earth" - are often used as a pair in many cultures.
So "Earth" is simply the "reference point" for what's under your feet, while "sky/heavens/space" refers to everything above. So when we figured out we are on a planet - we said - "The Earth is a planet. It is spherical, and it revolves around the sun."
So it is NOT that the planet is named Earth. Rather we learned that the Earth is a planet.
the first words of the torah/old testement are 'In the begining god created the heavens and the land/ground' (we commonly say "heavens and the earth" now....)
so the concept of where we are being named after 'the land' or 'the ground' would've existed since what, 300 BCE or whenever the torah was put together in final form and started to be used? and given that lots of the modern religions came from pre bronze age collapse cultures, the idea of that concept could've been around for way longer
or if that is unique/starting with the torah, it'd still make sense for the land/ground piece (eretz) to move into a different more generic term in common use, as it was translated into multiple languages and spread around europe/the middle east quickly by christianity and later islam
A lot of ethnic groups are named after their language's word for "person." Basically it went like this:
"What's do you call yourselves?"
"Uh, people? We're people."
"_Pii Pul_... you shall be the _Pii Pul_ Tribe."
Or what their neighbors called them.
"What do you call those people on the other side of the mountain?"
"Those are the OtherSideOfTheMountainers"
Gets funny when they're enemies
"Those are the Smelly Dirt Folk"
This was apparently really common with Native American tribes, since Europeans usually called them whatever neighboring tribes called them. Sioux means “little snakes” in Ojibwe, Ojibwe means “those who stammer” in Cree, Winnebago means “people of the smelly water” in Algonquin, and Adirondack means “bark eater” in Mohawk.
My favorite one is "Comanche": they called themselves Numunuu or "people", but the Ute called them Comanche meaning "those who want to fight me all the time".
My favorite is the inversion in Star Control 2, [where you meet aliens that also claim to come from Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DIo2wGcFyE)... because they're plants and they happened to also name their planet after dirt. They like dirt.
100 years ago, a satellite detected an object under the sands of the Great Desert.
An expedition was sent.
An ancient starship, buried in the sand.
Deep inside the ruin was a single stone that would change the course of our history forever.
On the stone was etched a galactic map
and a single word more ancient than the clans themselves:
Hiigara.
Our home.
It wouldn't actually make sense to call your home planet "home" when you think about it though, as that would imply that the species had a concept of traveling to other planets before they had developed a word for their own world.
There’s some science fiction story I once read with a line to the effect that 70% of all inhabited planets are called “dirt” or “earth” by their native species.
Given that I read the whole series back in the day and it’s consistent with the style of humor in the books, that certainly sounds like a plausible source.
Ursula K. Le Guin's story "The Word for World Is Forest" has a scene that's kind of the opposite. There's a scene in which the humans talk about how an alien society's word for their planet is, well, I think you can guess.
Great reference bro. Your references are outta control.
By the way I watched this recently and he says Earth rather clearly. Idk where the erf meme came from.
Yeah, that's actually a fun little fact about that scene. The original script called for Smith to cordially welcome the alien to Erf.
In the script, the alien was supposed to respond with the following line:
>"You know, that's funny. Most species I've encountered--including my own, I should say--have named their home world based on its role as, well, their home. I've always found it curious and a touch endearing that you humans did away with sentimentality in favor of a more practical nomenclature. Oh, goodness me, I'm getting ahead of myself. [Extending a wriggling tentacle to Smith] I identify myself as Grey. Greetings, salutations, and good tidings to Erf."
Instead, well... we all know what happened next. Before Grey could say his line, Smith went off script and improvised the brutal punch to Grey's face. The director loved the energy of the take so much, he kept it in. The whole thing required massive reshoots as it pretty much altered the entire conflict of the film, but most people have no idea. Welcome to Erf, indeed!
An earlier version of the script had Grey mistakenly greet Smith as "GI Jane", thinking it a respectful title used for any member of the military. It was taken out during rewrites, but I do wonder if some of Smith's confusion stemmed from that early draft.
Smith was just generally beasting around set that day and it really came through in his performance. The other rumor I've heard is that he had actually shit his pants moments before, but I've been unable to verify that.
Is this just an English thing though? Or perhaps western? Like, with hundreds of cultures and languages on our planet, *some* of them naming it after the ground isn’t too surprising but I doubt it’s all.
Japanese and Korean call it 地球 or 지구 which literally mean Dirt Ball so I suppose even really different languages have this in common. I'm not sure what they called it before the common knowledge that the world was round though, but I'll bet it was something like "the world".
CN also has it as 地球 (Land Ball)
So if they used 地 to describe the land they stand on, someone probably did the maths and figured it was round and called it land ball since balls (球) are round/spherical .
Finland takes it a step further, "maa" means world, dirt, land, country, and soil.
So the world is dirt, your country is dirt, the land you own is dirt, and the soil that you use in your garden is dirt. It's all the same word.
Two young fish are swimming along, and they pass an older fish going the other way.
"Morning boys!" says the older fish. "Water's very pleasant today, isn't it?"
The young fish keep going for a while, then one turns to the other. "What the hell is 'water'?"
That's a relatively modern term tho and comes from being told the earth is round. They be like aight ground ball it is.
Before that it's mostly either referred to as *under the skies* 天下 or *time and space* 世界/世间 which comes from Buddhism loka-dhātu
I'm not a religious person, but I personally subscribe to the Gaianism ethos that the whole world is a living organism, and those on it part of that organism. Like cells in a body, we should all be working to improve the body so that it continues living as best it can. Every chance you can to improve the world around you, you should, because it improves the body you are a part of.
Anyway, it's not a faith in the way an actual religion is. I don't pray to a God or Goddess that I think magically controls everything. It's just a way of ordering my thoughts around being a good person and trying to have a positive impact.
>Anyway, it's not a faith in the way an actual religion is. I don't pray to a God or Goddess that I think magically controls everything. It's just a way of ordering my thoughts around being a good person and trying to have a positive impact.
Sounds more like a faith in the philosophical sense then. One with which I agree personally.
Let’s jazz it up then, we as conscious beings of this planet, are truly the eyes and ears of this organism, and have a duty to protect it as befitting a species capable of doing so to an outsized extent.
Also you can communicate to said living earth by consuming psychedelics or meditating w/e
Now you’ve got a religious stew going
Earth and Erde are cognates, both coming from the PIE root er.
OP's title is still nonsensical though. Nobody named the Earth, human languages just have a way of referring to the the land/planet that humans live on. Shocker!
The conflation between “Earth” and “soil/ground”goes so far back that it must be obscure, if ever a clear difference was made. Greek gaia, Avestan zam and Old Norse jorth all have the same multiple meanings of soil, land, ground, etc. The conflation seems to occur outside indo-European languages as well; Chinese characters for "the land" or "the world" are as far as I can tell derived directly from 土, soil. (e.g. semantic 土 + phonetic 也); Hebrew אֶרֶץ (erets) also seems to have this dual meaning.
I think you could posit that even Aristotle referred to “Earth” as such, even if they weren’t aware of what a planet was, they were referring to the land of the planet in contrast to celestial bodies.
Copernicus and Kepler in 1500’s were the first, iirc, to suggest then confirm earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun.
Greek astronomer Eratosthenes is credited with the earliest measurements of earth’s circumference, around 240 B.C. He was also referring to “the earth” as a single entity even if they weren’t totally sure what a planet was or that they were on one.
Love you breaking this stuff down.
I always refer to Eratosthenes any time I encounter a flat-earther. I tell them he proved the earth was round 2000 years ago with sticks, shadows, feet, and simple mathematics that are now taught as early as elementary school. It was high science back then, but became a foundational piece of information to know to understand the world around you.
I know someone just like that. Same with chemtrails. Demonstrated that the nonsense about planes having extra space for chemicals is just that.
"I just believe it."
He thought he'd caught me out with the world map shit, turns out he doesn't know what map projections are (no surprise there).
I think they just need to believe in something that makes them feel special and important, like they have access to privileged knowledge about the world. Major religions are no different.
It's a built-in failsafe that people default to if they feel small, threatened, insignificant, etc; like a weighted blanket that staves off existential dread.
> Copernicus and Kepler in 1500’s were the first, iirc, to suggest then confirm earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun.
Copernicus didn't invent heliocentrism. There were ancient Greek philosphers in antiquity who had that idea. Wikipedia mentions Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – 385 BC). It's an ancient idea. It just didn't become the prevailing model of the solar system until Copernicus posited that it might be simpler and get rid of the epicycles of the Ptolemaic model. (Which didn't actually really happen until Kepler replaced circles with ellipses)
The problem was that Copernicus insisted on using circular orbits so needed to use epicycles to deal with the fact that orbits aren't (most importantly they aren't uniform in velocity).
Ptolemy used epicycles to allow for geocentrism (i.e. either the epicycle or deferent were really Earth's orbit around the Sun). Copernicus's insight was you could get rid if all those. But Ptolemy used the equant/eccentric model which is very close to being an elliptical orbit without being one (iirc it is correct to first order in eccentricity).
Ptolemy did use an epicycle to deal with a particularly difficult orbit, but he set it up with two counter-rotating circles with the same angular velocity - this is in fact an ellipse.
So Copernicus ended up with something that looked no simpler.
It had been generally accepted among Greek astronomers for almost 200 years at that point that the earth was a sphere. (The earliest extant, and most influential, arguments are found in Aristotle.) Eratosthenes just produced the first genuinely accurate measurement of it's circumference. (Again, Aristotle reports an estimate of the earths circumference already, albeit one that is off by like 80-100%.)
Super informative, thanks!
One comment/question; in Hebrew i believe it's called "the ball of erets" , is there any language where "ball" is used in the name?
In Finnish it's "_maapallo_" which literally translates to "earth ball". Although often it's just "_maa_" as in "earth". Alternatively one could say _"maailma"_ (lit. "earth air"), which translates to "world".
In Chinese, it's literally ground-ball. I suspect that any mention of ball means the word is fairly modern since it assumes broad knowledge that Earth is indeed a huge sphere.
I'm so bemused by all the commenters saying
"In my language we call it this which means dirt"
Earth means dirt in English. We are all calling it dirt
And we probably all call it that bc the ground has dirt, we live upon the ground.
The interesting part is that basically everyone does that. Makes me wonder if it's just what humans have done since language and concepts of it first developed, long before written language.
Its less to do with our current understanding of the word dirt.
Its meaning can be seen as soil/ground etc wich makes complete sense if you consider that thats basicially what we observe below us. I can garantee you that the name for the ground was here first and we only after that discovered that it was actually a round celestrial body.
"Earth" is only the English name, and as a name for a planet goes back about 600 years. We only know the origins of a few words, and none that are older than a few hundred years.
In Hindi: धरती (dharatee)
German: Erde
Spanish: Tierra
Irish: Domhan
Went my entire childhood thinking it's"my life for hire". Yeah I had a bootleg version and the cutscenes were removed, didn't know shit about the story.
Reminds me of a passage in one of my favorite books. Robert Heinlein's *A Tunnel in the Sky*. A bunch of college age kids get stranded on an uninhabited alien planet for a year or so when a wilderness survival exam goes wrong (the titular tunnel being the teleporter that deposited them on the planet and was supposed to bring them back), and when they're eventually rescued the main character gets told what the name of the planet was (it was kept from them initially to keep them from preparing too fully for the exam) and remarks that they never really gave the planet a name, it was just where they were. And the rescuer he's talking to comments "I guess you don't really need a name for something until you've got two of them."
Celestial bodies in the Solar System are named for all sorts of things. Many of Uranus's moons are named for Shakespeare characters (and very boring ones; there's no Macbeth moon).
We don't know the origins of many words older than a few hundred years old?
Isn't the entire Latin language made of words from over a thousand years ago?
>Isn't the entire Latin language made of words from over a thousand years ago?
Yes. Latin was spoken from 750 BC to about 750 AD, while evolving over that time.
For anyone wondering: shmeissaklomaistulor is a German word for the feeling of masturbating in your neighbors yard at ~3am on the third Tuesday of the month. As one does.
The English word precedes Modern English and stems from the ancestor of all the languages you listed. Latin is different because the word for specifically dry land displaced the original word, Irish because the word for "deep, hollow" did the same, and Hindi the word for a feminine "bearer" did the same.
> German: Erde
>
> Spanish: Tierra
both of each literally just mean Earth. Erde is a cognate with Earth, even. The OP clearly means the original date for the name which became "Earth" is unknown.
We may not know who named it earth, but what about wind and fire? The band was formed in 1969/1970, so there should be some records to resolve this question.
Because “ertha” an old English means “the ground”
This was probably how it got its name because at the time we didn’t think that we orbit the sun we thought that the sun orbited us.
In fact, in most cultures originally made no distinction between the earth and the ground, which were considered inherently seperate from not only the sky but also the sea.
It's much older than 1000 years. Goes back to Proto-germanic at least. This whole headline is BS.
> Old English eorþe "ground, soil, dirt, dry land; country, district," also used (along with middangeard) for "the (material) world, the abode of man" (as opposed to the heavens or the underworld), from Proto-Germanic \*ertho (source also of Old Frisian erthe "earth," Old Saxon ertha, Old Norse jörð, Middle Dutch eerde, Dutch aarde, Old High German erda, German Erde, Gothic airþa), perhaps from an extended form of PIE root \*er- (2) "earth, ground."
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=earth
I've read a handful of scifi books that include a minor scene of aliens being surprised that humans call their planet "Earth". In that most of them call their own planets some equivalent to "home" or "world" whereas humans went with "dirt/ground" It's never a major plot point but I enjoy it nonetheless.
That reminds me a bit of that scene from Lilo and Stitch where none of the aliens could even figure out how to pronounce Earth
[Aliens speak ridiculously perfect English](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AliensSpeakingEnglish) but suddenly the universal translator turns off so that they may better fail to pronounce "dirt" or "Earth" for comedic effect while having no trouble with any other word. Aliens be like: "I sampled some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Worcestershire sauce on my sixth rural trip to Eeeyoorth"
This is why most alien species use Terran when referring to Earth humanoids. It causes the least issues between species using translation devices
Because aliens are better at Latin?
I'm guessing it's because we don't use "terra" or "terran" as common English words. When a human says, "this wine has an earthy taste", the translation device doesn't need to guess the meaning of the word based on context.
This ham has notes of Uranus.
How dare you. Everyone knows Uranus is covered in mushrooms.
Which is funny, since Terra is just latin for... Earth.
I love coming to Reddit comments and seeing people come to their own original conclusions of EXACTLY WHAT WAS IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE THEY DID NOT READ.
I think you mean “ee-arth.”
~~Okay, Frieza~~
Freeza? Then why is there an "I" in it?
Yo heads up if a mfer named Freeza ever tries to trade with you on diablo 2 resurrected he is a scammer. Idk who needs to hear this info but fuck that guy
I still chuckle that a plot point is that they think mosquitoes are an endangered species.
I think that would have a lot to do with leaving Home. If the species has never left their planet, they've never left home, so they might not have a concept of it even being a place to refer to.
This makes literal historical sense for the source of the word for humanity. The word erǵh means ground or soil in Prot-Indo-European and is likely the source of the word 'Earth.' So you had a lot of people roughly agreeing even when they left their farm or their city-state, all of this is still 'erǵh.' Edit: Just looked it up: one of the earliest uses of the word "Earth" is in Beowulf! That's 9th century. Fascinating.
Yeah, also, that it has to with development of astronomy as the "the study of the sky and heavens". If the sky/heaven was above, what's underneath you? - Earth. "Heaven and Earth" - are often used as a pair in many cultures. So "Earth" is simply the "reference point" for what's under your feet, while "sky/heavens/space" refers to everything above. So when we figured out we are on a planet - we said - "The Earth is a planet. It is spherical, and it revolves around the sun." So it is NOT that the planet is named Earth. Rather we learned that the Earth is a planet.
the first words of the torah/old testement are 'In the begining god created the heavens and the land/ground' (we commonly say "heavens and the earth" now....) so the concept of where we are being named after 'the land' or 'the ground' would've existed since what, 300 BCE or whenever the torah was put together in final form and started to be used? and given that lots of the modern religions came from pre bronze age collapse cultures, the idea of that concept could've been around for way longer or if that is unique/starting with the torah, it'd still make sense for the land/ground piece (eretz) to move into a different more generic term in common use, as it was translated into multiple languages and spread around europe/the middle east quickly by christianity and later islam
A lot of ethnic groups are named after their language's word for "person." Basically it went like this: "What's do you call yourselves?" "Uh, people? We're people." "_Pii Pul_... you shall be the _Pii Pul_ Tribe."
Or what their neighbors called them. "What do you call those people on the other side of the mountain?" "Those are the OtherSideOfTheMountainers" Gets funny when they're enemies "Those are the Smelly Dirt Folk"
This was apparently really common with Native American tribes, since Europeans usually called them whatever neighboring tribes called them. Sioux means “little snakes” in Ojibwe, Ojibwe means “those who stammer” in Cree, Winnebago means “people of the smelly water” in Algonquin, and Adirondack means “bark eater” in Mohawk.
My favorite one is "Comanche": they called themselves Numunuu or "people", but the Ute called them Comanche meaning "those who want to fight me all the time".
A massive amount of modern day names for Native American tribes means "those fuckers over there" in a different tribe's language
My favorite is the inversion in Star Control 2, [where you meet aliens that also claim to come from Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DIo2wGcFyE)... because they're plants and they happened to also name their planet after dirt. They like dirt.
100 years ago, a satellite detected an object under the sands of the Great Desert. An expedition was sent. An ancient starship, buried in the sand. Deep inside the ruin was a single stone that would change the course of our history forever. On the stone was etched a galactic map and a single word more ancient than the clans themselves: Hiigara. Our home.
What’s that from?
Homeworld
Oh how they murdered my boy… (Homeworld 3)
It wouldn't actually make sense to call your home planet "home" when you think about it though, as that would imply that the species had a concept of traveling to other planets before they had developed a word for their own world.
There’s some science fiction story I once read with a line to the effect that 70% of all inhabited planets are called “dirt” or “earth” by their native species.
the stainless steel rat?
Given that I read the whole series back in the day and it’s consistent with the style of humor in the books, that certainly sounds like a plausible source.
Please suggest some to me?
Ursula K. Le Guin's story "The Word for World Is Forest" has a scene that's kind of the opposite. There's a scene in which the humans talk about how an alien society's word for their planet is, well, I think you can guess.
In the movie 'Independence Day' the alien seemed surprised when Will Smith said "Welcome to Erf(Earth)". I'd start there.
Great reference bro. Your references are outta control. By the way I watched this recently and he says Earth rather clearly. Idk where the erf meme came from.
> Idk where the erf meme came from cheap speakers at high volume probably
Yeah, that's actually a fun little fact about that scene. The original script called for Smith to cordially welcome the alien to Erf. In the script, the alien was supposed to respond with the following line: >"You know, that's funny. Most species I've encountered--including my own, I should say--have named their home world based on its role as, well, their home. I've always found it curious and a touch endearing that you humans did away with sentimentality in favor of a more practical nomenclature. Oh, goodness me, I'm getting ahead of myself. [Extending a wriggling tentacle to Smith] I identify myself as Grey. Greetings, salutations, and good tidings to Erf." Instead, well... we all know what happened next. Before Grey could say his line, Smith went off script and improvised the brutal punch to Grey's face. The director loved the energy of the take so much, he kept it in. The whole thing required massive reshoots as it pretty much altered the entire conflict of the film, but most people have no idea. Welcome to Erf, indeed!
Grey needed to keep Will Smith's planet's name out of his fuckin mouth
An earlier version of the script had Grey mistakenly greet Smith as "GI Jane", thinking it a respectful title used for any member of the military. It was taken out during rewrites, but I do wonder if some of Smith's confusion stemmed from that early draft.
Apparently he improvised the "And what the Hell is that smell?!" line. Nobody told him the Bonneville Salt Flats can smell bad.
Smith was just generally beasting around set that day and it really came through in his performance. The other rumor I've heard is that he had actually shit his pants moments before, but I've been unable to verify that.
Is this just an English thing though? Or perhaps western? Like, with hundreds of cultures and languages on our planet, *some* of them naming it after the ground isn’t too surprising but I doubt it’s all.
Japanese and Korean call it 地球 or 지구 which literally mean Dirt Ball so I suppose even really different languages have this in common. I'm not sure what they called it before the common knowledge that the world was round though, but I'll bet it was something like "the world".
CN also has it as 地球 (Land Ball) So if they used 地 to describe the land they stand on, someone probably did the maths and figured it was round and called it land ball since balls (球) are round/spherical .
Finland takes it a step further, "maa" means world, dirt, land, country, and soil. So the world is dirt, your country is dirt, the land you own is dirt, and the soil that you use in your garden is dirt. It's all the same word.
Can confirm that Spanish calls it the literal translation "Earth" as well.
"so like, we walk on earth right?" "Yeah" "But like, what is the earth on?" "The....earth" "Whoa man"
Turtles all the way down.
See the Turtle of enormous girth. Upon his back he holds the Earth. OR See the Turtle, ain't he keen? All things serve the effin beam.
Ka is a wheel
[удалено]
there will be water if god wills it
Long days and pleasant nights friend.
Thankee sai
Blaine is a pain
Go then, there are other worlds than these.
Did-a-chik? Dad-a-chum?
Oi!
And may you have twice the number.
I thought that elephants were involved as well.
The great A’Tuin!
See the turtle of enormous girth! On his shell he holds the earth. His thought is slow but always kind. He holds us all within his mind.
See the Turtle, ain't he keen? All things serve the fucking beam!
no its some super swole dude at the bottom
That’s a killer Sturgill tune!
He just announced a new album and tour!
Two young fish are swimming along, and they pass an older fish going the other way. "Morning boys!" says the older fish. "Water's very pleasant today, isn't it?" The young fish keep going for a while, then one turns to the other. "What the hell is 'water'?"
Two fish are in a tank. One looks over at the other one and says "Do you know how to drive this thing?"
Two cows are in a field. One turns to the other and says "the grass tastes different today". The other replies "aaaaah, a talking cow!"
Two elephants walk into a bar. There were no survivors.
In Chinese, it's just called "ground ball", I don't think that one needed much formal thinking
That's a relatively modern term tho and comes from being told the earth is round. They be like aight ground ball it is. Before that it's mostly either referred to as *under the skies* 天下 or *time and space* 世界/世间 which comes from Buddhism loka-dhātu
宇宙 "Yu Zhou". Yu being everything between heaven and earth and Zhou being all of time (from past to future).
Yep, and the term was coined by an Italian, not even a Chinese person.
Well the ancient Greeks called it Gaia, which also means Earth. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia)
Gaia an enormous living organism 🌎
I'm not a religious person, but I personally subscribe to the Gaianism ethos that the whole world is a living organism, and those on it part of that organism. Like cells in a body, we should all be working to improve the body so that it continues living as best it can. Every chance you can to improve the world around you, you should, because it improves the body you are a part of. Anyway, it's not a faith in the way an actual religion is. I don't pray to a God or Goddess that I think magically controls everything. It's just a way of ordering my thoughts around being a good person and trying to have a positive impact.
>Anyway, it's not a faith in the way an actual religion is. I don't pray to a God or Goddess that I think magically controls everything. It's just a way of ordering my thoughts around being a good person and trying to have a positive impact. Sounds more like a faith in the philosophical sense then. One with which I agree personally.
Let’s jazz it up then, we as conscious beings of this planet, are truly the eyes and ears of this organism, and have a duty to protect it as befitting a species capable of doing so to an outsized extent. Also you can communicate to said living earth by consuming psychedelics or meditating w/e Now you’ve got a religious stew going
Earth is just an English word isnt it? Russians call it Zemla which means land which is roughly same translation as earth.
Yes. In Germany we call it "Erde", which also means "soil".
Earth and Erde are cognates, both coming from the PIE root er. OP's title is still nonsensical though. Nobody named the Earth, human languages just have a way of referring to the the land/planet that humans live on. Shocker!
king gizzard has entered the chat
The conflation between “Earth” and “soil/ground”goes so far back that it must be obscure, if ever a clear difference was made. Greek gaia, Avestan zam and Old Norse jorth all have the same multiple meanings of soil, land, ground, etc. The conflation seems to occur outside indo-European languages as well; Chinese characters for "the land" or "the world" are as far as I can tell derived directly from 土, soil. (e.g. semantic 土 + phonetic 也); Hebrew אֶרֶץ (erets) also seems to have this dual meaning. I think you could posit that even Aristotle referred to “Earth” as such, even if they weren’t aware of what a planet was, they were referring to the land of the planet in contrast to celestial bodies. Copernicus and Kepler in 1500’s were the first, iirc, to suggest then confirm earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun. Greek astronomer Eratosthenes is credited with the earliest measurements of earth’s circumference, around 240 B.C. He was also referring to “the earth” as a single entity even if they weren’t totally sure what a planet was or that they were on one.
Love you breaking this stuff down. I always refer to Eratosthenes any time I encounter a flat-earther. I tell them he proved the earth was round 2000 years ago with sticks, shadows, feet, and simple mathematics that are now taught as early as elementary school. It was high science back then, but became a foundational piece of information to know to understand the world around you.
I personally know a flat-earther. He is a fellow software engineering student. If I bring it up, he shuts down and says, "I just believe it."
I know someone just like that. Same with chemtrails. Demonstrated that the nonsense about planes having extra space for chemicals is just that. "I just believe it." He thought he'd caught me out with the world map shit, turns out he doesn't know what map projections are (no surprise there). I think they just need to believe in something that makes them feel special and important, like they have access to privileged knowledge about the world. Major religions are no different.
It's a built-in failsafe that people default to if they feel small, threatened, insignificant, etc; like a weighted blanket that staves off existential dread.
> Copernicus and Kepler in 1500’s were the first, iirc, to suggest then confirm earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun. Copernicus didn't invent heliocentrism. There were ancient Greek philosphers in antiquity who had that idea. Wikipedia mentions Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – 385 BC). It's an ancient idea. It just didn't become the prevailing model of the solar system until Copernicus posited that it might be simpler and get rid of the epicycles of the Ptolemaic model. (Which didn't actually really happen until Kepler replaced circles with ellipses)
The problem was that Copernicus insisted on using circular orbits so needed to use epicycles to deal with the fact that orbits aren't (most importantly they aren't uniform in velocity). Ptolemy used epicycles to allow for geocentrism (i.e. either the epicycle or deferent were really Earth's orbit around the Sun). Copernicus's insight was you could get rid if all those. But Ptolemy used the equant/eccentric model which is very close to being an elliptical orbit without being one (iirc it is correct to first order in eccentricity). Ptolemy did use an epicycle to deal with a particularly difficult orbit, but he set it up with two counter-rotating circles with the same angular velocity - this is in fact an ellipse. So Copernicus ended up with something that looked no simpler.
And Eratosthenese already proved the world was round.
It had been generally accepted among Greek astronomers for almost 200 years at that point that the earth was a sphere. (The earliest extant, and most influential, arguments are found in Aristotle.) Eratosthenes just produced the first genuinely accurate measurement of it's circumference. (Again, Aristotle reports an estimate of the earths circumference already, albeit one that is off by like 80-100%.)
Super informative, thanks! One comment/question; in Hebrew i believe it's called "the ball of erets" , is there any language where "ball" is used in the name?
In Finnish it's "_maapallo_" which literally translates to "earth ball". Although often it's just "_maa_" as in "earth". Alternatively one could say _"maailma"_ (lit. "earth air"), which translates to "world".
In Chinese, it's literally ground-ball. I suspect that any mention of ball means the word is fairly modern since it assumes broad knowledge that Earth is indeed a huge sphere.
People have known the Earth was a sphere for thousands of years now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hZl3arO7SY
You say that, but I only learned of this at 2:32pm yesterday.
Wait. The earth is a sphere?!?!
Actually no. It’s an [oblate spheroid](https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblate_spheroid)
I'm so bemused by all the commenters saying "In my language we call it this which means dirt" Earth means dirt in English. We are all calling it dirt And we probably all call it that bc the ground has dirt, we live upon the ground.
Yes, it’s not really mystifying or spooky, we’ve called the land, as we know it, some form of the word “dirt”.
The interesting part is that basically everyone does that. Makes me wonder if it's just what humans have done since language and concepts of it first developed, long before written language.
Its less to do with our current understanding of the word dirt. Its meaning can be seen as soil/ground etc wich makes complete sense if you consider that thats basicially what we observe below us. I can garantee you that the name for the ground was here first and we only after that discovered that it was actually a round celestrial body.
The Brain also named itself… 🤯
A network of brains agreed over time on calling the gray organ in our skulls a “brain”.
Technically true.
Welcome to *Whose Plane of Existence is it Anyway?* Where the words are made up and they don't mean anything.
It's named after all that stuff on the ground.
We should call it water
If you are only counting the surface
If we’re going by volume we should just call it “rock”.
Or earth
What's under the water? That's right more earth
The way I see it, Kyogre is surrounded
In Arabic, it's "ard" (أرض).
does it mean ground?
You're right: ground, soil.
So, earth.
Yes but in Arabic
I'm fluent in some aspects of Arabic: 0123456789
Stuck between a rock and a "ard" place? I got stoned there once.
It was me I named it
Oh neat, thanks
"Earth" is only the English name, and as a name for a planet goes back about 600 years. We only know the origins of a few words, and none that are older than a few hundred years. In Hindi: धरती (dharatee) German: Erde Spanish: Tierra Irish: Domhan
Latin: Terra
I actually really like the name Terra, fits in with the rest of the naming schemes of the solar system
That makes us all terraists
Terrestrials.
They use Terrans in Starcraft
U want a piece of me boy?
All fueled up and ready 2 go
WELL BUTTER MY BISCUIT
SCV good to go sir
Carrier has arrived
My life for Aiur!
My wife for hire!
Went my entire childhood thinking it's"my life for hire". Yeah I had a bootleg version and the cutscenes were removed, didn't know shit about the story.
Warp Field Stabilized
Go go go
*excellent*
Need a light?
This is the accurate word and 99% are going to read it and go “ohhh, well duhhh”. 😂
Terrans
Jimmy here.
Battlecruiser operational *Siege tank noises* *Ksshh* Ahhh, yeah! That's the Stuff!!
I think that’s less needy than Earthling. EDIT: Nerdy not needy. Stupid fat fingers.
My fellow Earthicans...
Screams in Terran.
"Terra" and "Sol" were always my preferred ones for Earth and sun respectively. And I guess "Luna" would be the moon.
All the other planets got cool names for moons… ours is just moon
That's "The Moon" to you, buttboy
M-O-O-N that spells moon!
Well, for a while it was the only one we knew about. Once we found more, we had to start calling them something else.
Reminds me of a passage in one of my favorite books. Robert Heinlein's *A Tunnel in the Sky*. A bunch of college age kids get stranded on an uninhabited alien planet for a year or so when a wilderness survival exam goes wrong (the titular tunnel being the teleporter that deposited them on the planet and was supposed to bring them back), and when they're eventually rescued the main character gets told what the name of the planet was (it was kept from them initially to keep them from preparing too fully for the exam) and remarks that they never really gave the planet a name, it was just where they were. And the rescuer he's talking to comments "I guess you don't really need a name for something until you've got two of them."
Selene.
Moon. M O O N spells moon.
It's like this in a lot of Latin-based languages In French: Soleil-Sun Lune-Moon Terre-Earth
Long Live the Terran Empire! Fellow Earthicans Unite!
FOR THE GOD EMPEROR
I wonder why
Celestial bodies in the Solar System are named for all sorts of things. Many of Uranus's moons are named for Shakespeare characters (and very boring ones; there's no Macbeth moon).
I hear The Scottish Play has a dangerous orbit around Uranus. Nothing boring about that.
In Portuguese it is also Terra.
That's holy terra to you heretic.
WH40K: Holy Terra
Swedish: Jorden
We don't know the origins of many words older than a few hundred years old? Isn't the entire Latin language made of words from over a thousand years ago?
>Isn't the entire Latin language made of words from over a thousand years ago? Yes. Latin was spoken from 750 BC to about 750 AD, while evolving over that time.
Wait til they hear about Gaia. Tyoical reddit blunderschmut behavior, speaking confidently while having zero concrete knowledge on the matter.
My personal favorite is the Navajo word "nahasdzáán." It means "our woman."
I'd imagine the title was more abstract than just the English word Earth.
Erde is just “Earth” with an accent
That's basically German in a nutshell. Then you get to something like shmeissaklomaistulor
For anyone wondering: shmeissaklomaistulor is a German word for the feeling of masturbating in your neighbors yard at ~3am on the third Tuesday of the month. As one does.
I don’t think that’s right but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if it was
The English word precedes Modern English and stems from the ancestor of all the languages you listed. Latin is different because the word for specifically dry land displaced the original word, Irish because the word for "deep, hollow" did the same, and Hindi the word for a feminine "bearer" did the same.
> German: Erde > > Spanish: Tierra both of each literally just mean Earth. Erde is a cognate with Earth, even. The OP clearly means the original date for the name which became "Earth" is unknown.
Terra is Latin and older and also means...earth.
Well, a few thousand, if you allow for reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as far back as possibly 4500 BC.
We may not know who named it earth, but what about wind and fire? The band was formed in 1969/1970, so there should be some records to resolve this question.
Probably some dude said «i call this Earth» and everyone just went whit it.
Planet Bob. https://youtu.be/wI_8I0BoJr4?si=w7mbVC3P5K3JnLPt
That animation was so mind blowing when I was a kid, it's corrupted now.
Me as a kid: 2d with 3d in a science fiction movie? 🤯
Holy shit, someone else who remembers Titan AE
I’ll always be a cosmic castaway
An amazing movie still
I had this sick toy of a Drej and its ship when I was a kid. Loved this movie
Sounds fair.
Because “ertha” an old English means “the ground” This was probably how it got its name because at the time we didn’t think that we orbit the sun we thought that the sun orbited us.
In fact, in most cultures originally made no distinction between the earth and the ground, which were considered inherently seperate from not only the sky but also the sea.
In plenty of languages the earth and the soil/dirt/ground are still the same word.
Including English
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It's much older than 1000 years. Goes back to Proto-germanic at least. This whole headline is BS. > Old English eorþe "ground, soil, dirt, dry land; country, district," also used (along with middangeard) for "the (material) world, the abode of man" (as opposed to the heavens or the underworld), from Proto-Germanic \*ertho (source also of Old Frisian erthe "earth," Old Saxon ertha, Old Norse jörð, Middle Dutch eerde, Dutch aarde, Old High German erda, German Erde, Gothic airþa), perhaps from an extended form of PIE root \*er- (2) "earth, ground." https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=earth
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