Planet Earth.
The third rock from the sun.
Our home.
Planet Earth has been around for four and a half billion years…but how long has it
been called Earth for and who gave it its name?
Hello and welcome back to Life’s Biggest Questions, the channel that looks to answer
a plethora of queries from since to space, history to popculture and more.
I am your host Rebecca Felgate and today I am asking How Did Earth Get its Name?
Before we jump into answering this question – I want to ask you guys what your favourite
planet outside of earth is?
Mine is Saturn.
Also while you are down there leaving me a comment, why don’t you hit that thumbs up
button and subscribe to Life’s Biggest Questions if you haven’t yet.
Also do stick around until the end of the video where I will be reading your comments
from a previous video.
So Earth.
Earth is the English language name for our planet.
It isn’t actually the universal name for our rock.
In Spanish it is Tierra, in Dutch it is Aarde, Swedish, Jorden…and Erda in some Germanic
Languages.
The one thing they tend to have in common is that they are all rough translations that
also synonym soil or ground.
So the generally accepted universal name is roughly translatable in most languages.
It is the only one of the planets in our solar system that has not been named after a Greek
or Roman God or Goddess.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
The earliest named among them were first spotted around 5 BCE, although I say that – this
is when their names were first recorded... a lot of them are visible to the naked eye
and could have had different names and understandings from other ancient civilisations who just
didn’t write them down.
The word Earth itself started appearing in text around the 8th Century AD, but Earth
is the only planet not named after a Greek or Roman God, which seems to suggest that
it was named before we had an awareness of other planets…which means the name must
go back much further than it has been documented.
In terms of WHO named the Earth, we simply can’t tell you – it is likely there was
not just one individual, but rather a general consensus as to the name.
It makes sense really – words like ground, soil, terrain, earth - it is something we
have always stood on – something tangible and constant, something even our earliest
of human ancestors would have understood.
Our understanding that we walk on something hard led us to give it a name, and as that
hard ground seemed constant in multiple places, it is likely that multiple adopted that name
as to better communicate.
The word earth was further perpetuated in the King James Bible of 1611 – which reads
God called the dry land Earth – in Genesis 1.10 – but of course by the time that baby
was written, we were already calling it Earth anyway…so…
I mean….if God did name it Earth, he probably should have written that one down and left
some evidence so we could credit him properly.Ahem…moving on.
The lasting point here really is, when it comes to etymology – some words have existed
longer than our ability to write them down.
Something to consider… like..sure….we call it Earth and everyone basically seems
cool with that from one translation to another, but do you think animals have a different
word for it?
We assume that animals don’t really get planets… but I wonder if they have their
own understandings of the land?
Also, I wonder if aliens, if they exist and know about us, have a different name for it.
We go around naming things in our solar system, in our galaxy, but they might not be the names
they would pick for themselves, if they could.
Imagine, for example, we found life on Jupiter and all the Jupiter aliens were like….
What is a Jupiter… our home is called shhnaagokwe.
What are words anyway.
Sounds like a philosophical distraction, Rebecca, not an answer.
How astute of you.
I am sorry.
Ultimately, we don’t know exactly who named our planet so the story of how we became known
as earth is incomplete.
We can only assume a lot of people looked down, decided on a soily, ground sounding
word, and we called it that because it made sense.
So guys, who do you think first coined the name earth?
What would you call it now if you had the choice…also don’t forget to tell me your
favourite planet?
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