A lot of people did.
It’s called “Maa” in Finnish, “Erde” in German", “Земля” in Ukrainian, etc. Each of those means “dirt” as well.I guess if we were to go to some other planet and find sapient locals there, they’d probably call their planet something that translates to “dirt” or “ground” or something similar.
I went to Wiktionary and checked some 15 languages from across the… Earth. And each but one that had an etymology mentioned, said it comes from their word for land or dirt. In Georgian this planet is called Motherdirt, which I found funny. In Arabic, however, our planet is called “The lower place”, as opposed to the “The upper place”, which means heaven. So, there’s at least one language that has elected to do it differently. And there was very scarce data for various indigenous American languages, so I couldn’t find much about them. In Taos, spoken in Mexico, their word for Earth translates to “land”. The Greenlandic name for our planet does mean land, as well. And their language came from North America, so the only North American samples I could get are “Earth” as well. And Japanese, Sumerian, Coptic, you name it, it’s always the same: Either “land” or “dirt”.
Tbf, a few Native American cultures use variations of Turtle Island which reference the creation story of living on the back of a giant turtle
Thanks, that’s awesome to know! But even there we then have the … island. Basically “land” again :)
Didn’t expect to find Pratchett connections in native American culture…
Adding Sanskrit to the list
Which one? I guess to the list of “Dirt”, because it’s an Indo-European language, so I’d assume it does things the same way as any other Indo-European language would.
You stand on dirt and you don’t know what a planet is yet, so you call the stuff you stand on earth.
A long time later people figure out what a planet is but at that point people have been around standing on earth for ages, so you call the planet earth.
“Welcome to Planet Dirt”(1)
“I think our universal translator is broken. It sounded like you said ‘Planet Dirt’”
“I did.”
“What are some of the deserts on this planet”
“Well, the Desert desert, the Desert desert, the Desert desert.”(2-4)
“You said the word ‘desert’ six times. Whatever. What is this particular location called?”
“I don’t know what you just said.”(5)
“Now I know my universal translator is busted.”
(1) Earth
(2-4) Gobi, Sahara, Mohave
(5) Yucatan
Don’t forget the River river, the River river, the River river, the Riv-
It’s a dirty little secret.
You mean Terra?
Sol 3
Tertius
Firma?
Not always.
It’s been a while since I studied etymology, but IIRC its original roots were associated with a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias as they fell from the skies.
You talking about dirt or the planet? Pretty sure the planet was named after dirt.
