Yes we do know, It comes from the Latin language during the roman empire. Terra which means soil/ground in Latin. it deviated to Terra in italian and portuguese, tierra in spanish and terre in french.
English was influenced by french so they took the meaning of earth from there. The word earth in english comes from old english or irish I dont remember correctly.
Yeah, earth in Dutch is “aarde” and in German it’s “erde”, which both sound related to “earth”.
However, it originally must have meant soil/dirt/land, long before those humans were even aware of the concept of planets. So who was the first to call Earth after earth or Terre after terre? Probably the first persons to figure out that they were living on a planet is my guess, it makes sense to name something after the part that you can see imo.
Wait what? It dates back a thousand years? So what did people call the planet they lived on in 200 AD? Or 500 BC? Surely they had a word for it before then. Or did they feel they lived ON the universe?
It’s the opposite - the name of the primal goddess is just the word for ground. The same things happens with other gods like Hestia (hearth), they were named after the things that they personified.
When it comes to English the problem can be split into two: the origin of the word, and its usage to refer to the planet.
The origin of the word is actually well known - English “earth” comes from Proto-Germanic *erþō “ground, soil”, that in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ér-teh₂. That *h₁ér- root pops up in plenty words referring to soil and land in IE languages; while that *-teh₂ nouns for states of being, so odds are that the word ultimately meant “the bare soil” or similar.
Now, the usage of the word for the planet gets trickier, since this metaphor - the whole/planet by the part/soil - pops up all the time. Even for non-Indo-European languages like:
Basque - “Lurra” Earth is simply “lur” soil with a determiner
Tatar - “Zemin” Earth, planet vs. “zemin” earth, soil
Greenlandic - “nuna” for both
The furthest from that that I’ve seen was Nahuatl calling the planet “tlalticpactl” over the land - but even then that “tlal[li]” at the start is land, soil.
The metaphor is so popular, but so popular, that it becomes hard to track where it originated - because it likely originated multiple times. I wouldn’t be surprised for example if English simply inherited it “as is”, as German “Erde” behaves the same. The same applies to the Romance languages with Latin “Terra”, they simply inherited the word with the double meaning and called it a day.
And as to why Earth has become the accepted term rather than ‘terra’, ‘orbis’ or some variant on ‘mundus’, well, that’s a tougher question to answer.
In English it’s simply because “Earth” is its native word. Other languages typically don’t use this word.
That ⟨地球⟩ is perhaps the only exception that we’re damn sure on how Earth got its name. The guy who coined the expression was a priest of the Papal States called Matteo Ricci, living in Ming around 1600. He did a living translating works back and forth between Chinese and Latin, and calqued that expression from Latin orbis terrarum - roughly “the globe of soils”, or “the ball of earths”.
Ancient Chinese mysticism (yijing, wuxing, daoism) have the concept of earth as either kūn (field, like of grass) or di (earth, like soil). I believe both are 地. This is in contrast to Heaven (tian) which is above. I believe both were conceived of as infinite parallel planes.
天地人 (tiān-dì-rén) are Heaven, Earth, and Human; and were sometimes seen as the 3 primal forces of reality.
Thanks for the further info! That 地 alone does follow the pattern of the other languages.
Your explanation gives Ricci’s odd calque a lot more sense - he’s using the old term, but highlighting that it’s a ball, not an infinite plane. As in, he was trying to be accurate to the sources, and he could only do it through that calque.
Even the term “planet” here is noisy, as it implies knowledge of an orb floating and/or spinning in space.
Maybe a better (less modern scientific) term in this case would be “world”, which could have been “what I have seen and have heard about, plus the regions beyond where dragons lie”, as an equivalent to “one, two, three, many”.
Fair point - notlahtlacōl. “World” does seem more accurate.
I wouldn’t be surprised if modern Nahuatl varieties used tlālticpactli to refer to the planet itself. (Still, my example is from Classical Nahuatl, so your correction is spot on.)
English: points at river “What is this?”
Celtic native: “it’s a river, bro”
English: “Then we shall call it the River River.” points at ground “What is this?”
Native: “it’s the ground, dirt, EARTH.”
English: “Well golly fucking gosh, I have the perfect name”
TLDR: article is clickbait title, which goes on to explain the etymological origin of the name “Earth” coming from Old English, and other dead languages have other names for Earth such as “Terra”.
The oldest possible record for the term “Earth” comes from Proto-Indo-European “Er-”, which means ground or soil.
I like how this article ends up describing the difference between naming Earth as opposed to other planets and the more in-depth etymological explenations of all the names.
Sorry, I find etymology interesting, and the original post caught my attention, so I felt compelled to point a few things out.
But that doesn’t explain how we treated to call this planet by the name we give to dirt. We could have called the earth “rocks” or “sand” instead, but no. When did we realise we are sitting on a floating ball of dirt?
My theory is that people who are obsessed with aliens or the paranormal are just subconsciously struggling with the cognitive dissonance they feel about the relationship between their “self” and “other” people, or vise versa.
In order to answer the question “are we alone in the universe?” first you have to establish what it would mean to be “alone”.
It comes down to existential fear. “What if there are other beings out there who are more capable than us and will treat us the way we treat beings who are less capable than ourselves?”
The only way to resolve that dissonance is to believe that despite our differences with aliens, we could come to understand each other and coexist peacefully. Of course that’s a difficult conclusion to come to when the people experiencing this fear generally have a hard enough time accepting the differences between members of their own fuckin’ species lol
when the people experiencing this fear generally have a hard enough time accepting the differences between members of their own fuckin’ species lol
Considering the apex predators on this planet often leave people that look like me in chalk outlines to be carted off to the morgue, I really wonder why that is
Because if we’re really alone in this universe; if all I have to look forward to in this ‘experience’ is ignorant, greedy, half-of-the-time abjectly-evil humanity; I’m necking myself.
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