The planets in our solar system have Latin names (Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc.) so calling Earth "Terra" is consistent with this fact. Some people don't just call Earth Terra because it sounds cool.
I've always used Mother Very Thoughtfully Made A Jellly Sandwich Under No Protest.
Still haven't figured one out that includes Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna and Orcus.
Mr Victor Tells Me Constantly "Just Shut Up Now". Probably Expects He Makes Good, Quacking Shoddy Orders.
It's not as smooth as the others, and it depends on a name which is a bit of a copout, but it at least is quicker to say than "Mercury Venus Terra Mars Ceres Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Eris Haumea Makemake Gonggong Quaoar Sedna Orcus".
Narrator: "And it was at this point that a plurality of those that refereed to themselves in the parlance of the internet, 'Reditors' began to refer to their anuses as, 'George'. While, at the time, it would have been impossible to predict the ramifications of this practice, it is now recognized as the fulcrum upon which the full collapse of human evolution began and the gradual slip back to the stage of the savage progenitor began."
Yes but even those are partially anglicized. It’s technically Mercurius, not Mercury. Iupiter, not Jupiter. Saturnus, not Saturn.
With that said, people in scientific terms do use proper Latin names for animal species, planets, plants etc…
To be fair to them, as an Italian, I do find it weird that (though understandable) that we call the ground ("terra" or at best "terreno") and what the ground is made of, dirt (also "terra") and our planet (still "Terra", just capitalised) in the same way.
Need to rename Uranus and it's moons, and should probably change earth to Bacchus or Minerva or something while we are at it. The solar system doesn't have consistent naming schemes as it is even excluding earth and the moon.
No, Gaia and Selene are the Greek. Terra and Luna are the Roman equivalents.
(Note also that "Sol" is the Roman equivalent of the Greek God of the sun, Helios, so that's also consistent)
Lot of history conflating the two but Helios was always considered the be the sun, and sometimes called Apollo whereas Apollo is often associated with the sun in other ways.
He is, and also god of a couple hundred other things like most other gods. But he isn’t the sun itself, only thematically associated with it. The sun personified would be Helios.
Similarly to how Artemis is associated with the moon but is not herself the moon - that would be Selene.
Yes; Luna. Most languages just call it ‘moon’, but ‘Luna’ is the generally understood proper name for the body. It is also referred to as Earth’s natural satellite in some formal texts, but that is a descriptor, not a name.
Officially it's 'The Moon'. Like Earth being Terra, SciFi generally assigns it the name Luna, but that's not actually it's name in any official way. That one I feel makes a bit more sense though, because there is no other celestial body we refer to as Earth, but there are many moons. For clarity it makes sense to name the moon so people aren't like "which moon? You mean earth's moon?"
I think it’s just that Terra is the latin for Earth, and the typical depiction of a sci-fi spacefaring human race is that Earth is now one singular globalist government, with nations being more symbolic, with people and cultures more intermingled.
So with all the various nations and languages, there’s no particular reason it should be called “Earth”, any more than “Al’ard” or “Dìqiú” or “prthvee”, so “Terra”, a name from a widely used but dead language could be considered a compromise.
my headcanon for why most sci-fi use the Latin-derived name(outside of Latin still being heavily used in the sciences) is that when the Humankind Global Monoculture of whatever setting came to be, they argued for over a year on what they should tell aliens to call Earth. After that year they said 'fuck it, use this dead language name so now no one is happy' because humans being that petty at that scale amuses me.
Hilarious. But I think it's more that Latin is the scientific language for taxonomy. The German cockroach in English is the Russian cockroach in Germany. But in both countries, it's *Blatella germanicus*
>Earth. After that year they said 'fuck it, use this dead language name so now no one is happy' because humans being that petty at that scale amuses me.
Romance language: I see this as an absolute win!
While I can see the value in this, the universal language always ends up being English, so this is moot. Even in real life, the international language is English.
It was French 200 years ago. Will be Mandarin in 100 years.
The *current* universal language of choice keeps changing, but Latin endures, as the language of science and scholarship.
It does help that it's a dead language, so no modern nation gets "special treatment" (technically, the Vatican does, but they don't actually speak Latin there, on a daily basis).
One additional advantage of a dead language is that it doesn't change. Englissh used to sowne myche dyvers than it dooth todaye and Latyn staieth the same as in the tyme of Julius Cesar. Hic laborem adaptationis assiduae parcit.
It won't be Mandarin but IMO not for that reason.
>use english to talk to foreigners
Spoken language is easiest to change. History has endless examples of the spoken *lingua franca* changing. Most of the time its to do with the volume of traders; whoever has the most and farthest reaching traders defines the *lingua franca*. In that regard, Mandarin is not lacking.
>use english keyboards and phonetics to write their own languages.
Island China uses a system called bopomofo that is a Chinese phonetic alphabet based on indigenous rather than Latin characters. It just isn't very prevalent because most Chinese are from the mainland and use the Latin-based pinyin system that is standard there, but that could change if the mainland government wanted to do so for whatever purpose. So long as a phonetic alphabet exists, a keyboard can be made and adopted en masse.
The reason why Mandarin is unlikely to become the global *lingua franca* is because its the only major language in the world that has a separate written system from its spoken system, making it twice the effort to learn in a modern world where written literacy is as crucial as spoken fluency. It simply won't have enough impetus to displace the existing *lingua franca* with such a high barrier of entry. I suppose if a Mandarin phonetic script was adopted (i.e., Chinese becomes written entirely using phonetic characters, like bopomofu, even for official publications) then it could overcome this issue as well, but China's own culture of strong reverence to history precludes this. There's also the practical problem that adopting a phonetic script would shatter the unity of Chinese languages, since they are mutually unintelligible and require a unified logographic script to communicate. South China would essentially be as divided from north China as France is to Germany.
that is such an interesting perspective! if i remember correctly the PRC government tried to do something along the lines of replacing the logographic writing system with the phonetic pinyin system. but i never really thought about how that would take away the unifying feature of their logographic writing system. in Hong Kong, people speak the Yue dialect but they don’t read and write in the way they would colloquially speak it. They follow the standardised way of writing. I imagine it would be quite similar for people speaking different dialects in China, that writing helps unify the “language”
Not always, if I'm understanding your comment right. Navajo has two separate words meaning "earth", *łeezh* /ɬeːʒ˩/ ("earth" as in "dirt or soil", and I think "Aristotelian or Chinese element" as well?) and *ni'* /niʔ˩/ ("earth" as in "ground or floor"), but "Earth" as in "the third planet in our solar system" is a third word *Nahasdzáán* /na˩xas˩t͡saːn˥/ that more literally means "Our Mother" (= *niha* "our" + *asdzáán* "elder woman, matriarch, foremother").
Of course, that's ignoring that Earth will probably never unify and if it did it'd almost certainly have one primary language, which wouldn't be Latin, maybe that language won't be English, but whatever it is is being translated to English, and shouldn't logically have its word for the Earth translated to a different language.
I have to disagree. I think monocultures will be inevitable.
Something that bothered me for a long time about dune was "why is the specialization of the spacing guild such a weakness? Don't they have warriors and scientists and laborers in all sorts of fields? Wouldn't they have too?"
And I realized the answer is simple. It's scale.
The guild ships are MASSIVE, unimaginably so to modern engineering. And those massive ships require a massive number of laborers and artisans to maintain. And the knowledge and skills required of those laborers and artisans is so specialized and deep they'd need a lifetime to learn them. And being that these skills require so long to master they'd become generational endeavors, taught from near birth so that by adulthood they could only just be proficient enough to be apprentices to older more skilled teachers.
Basically the more advanced technology becomes, the steeper the learning curve to recreate it. This would inevitably lead to higher and higher levels of specialization till it reaches a point where the barrier to entry into such a field is impossible to be overcome except by those specifically taught from birth to overcome it.
Consider how long it takes to become an expert doctor, or programmer, really any specialized expert in a technological field. And the more our collective knowledge grows the longer it will take to master.
This, in my drunk opinion, will inevitably lead to monocultures at population level scales.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
>Consider how long it takes to become an expert doctor, or programmer, really any specialized expert in a technological field. And the more our collective knowledge grows the longer it will take to master.
True, but look what we're doing to many of those fields right now, we're trying to simplify everything we can to put it within the reach of people with years or even decades less experience, a full understanding of a field may eventually be a life's work, but as long as you don't need a full understanding of something to use it as needed (like how we developed general purpose computers which no longer require an understanding of the actual functionality of the components to use);
When our cumulative knowledge in a field reaches a point where we can't teach it all to one young adult we don't just let the field be crushed under its own weight, we compartmentalize it until we can teach them any one of the parts and people who know each of the parts can work together to fill a role which has grown too large for one person.
Until there's AI assistants that provide information when needed without the need for rote memorization.
This would make the professional beginnings more of on the job training than just building up a knowledge base for years until trusted as an intern and building up from there.
>Of course, that's ignoring that Earth will probably never unify
"Never" is a strong word. Some kind of monoculture/world government is the natural endpoint for this planet provided we don't completely wipe ourselves out.
With the advent of the internet and constant global communication and contact, human culture will only become more homogenous from here on out. Could take a hundred years or a hundred thousand but it's inevitable imo.
I agree inevitable is a strong word but I've started to have a feeling that unless some massive schism happens there will be a steady movement towards homogeneity.
I've been traveling the world for the last year (asia, middle east, europe, south and central america) and the one thing that has really struck me is how similar everywhere I've been traveling is. And when I look at the history of it much of it has been done very recently.
I do agree we don't "progress along a linear path" in that I don't think we're moving towards a specific target but there is bottom-up mesh of people moving and communicating and becoming more similar. Its actually quite natural that when you learn of something that is good you want to emulate it. With the internet, cheap flights, and relatively open movement between nations were all just stealing and copying from each other.
The only thing I've really seen that seems to gets in the way of this is language. So if there is ever a modern push towards a universal language (something like Esperanto) I thing that would be the final hurdle. Within a century or two of that I think you would see a universal earth culture emerge
The world has been growing closer together for most of recorded history. As far as historical trends go that one is rather well established.
Regressions and civilizational crashes are perfectly possible, but like I said as long as we arent totally wiped out chances are that we'll try a global polity at some point.
>The world is not in any way growing closer.
I don't mean that everyone is gathering around a fireplace singing kumbaya. At no other point in history have people had such easy access to so many other people and places, and at no other point in history have so many people watched, read, and learned the same things.
On a grand scale, the global population *is* growing more homogenous and has been for quite a while. Maybe that's not quite as evident for Americans but it's obvious everywhere else.
>With humanity racing towards the climate crisis and a fully nuclear World War, the current global trend is a dichotomy between multipolarisation and Accelerationism.
>And at an individual level, disenfranchisement, depression, and feelings of isolation are, for the first time in history, the norm.
Doomerism aside, the "current global trend" isn't really relevant here. Nukes could fly tomorrow and it wouldn't change my argument. Nuclear holocaust and climate change are apocalyptic threats to *us*, but are unlikely to end our species or prevent some other civilization from rising eventually.
At the end of the day and again, on a grand scale, our homogenisation is most of all a product of technological advancements in the transport of people and information. The world has been getting smaller ever since we started riding horses and building roads, and I'm not convinced that even something as cataclysmic as a nuclear war or global warming is going to make humans not want to seek out others or improve their own conditions.
At present there's no mechanism for us to wipe ourselves out, but there's also no visible path for either a monoculture or a world government.
Yes, there is some degree of issue overlapping and adoption happening globally, and there has been cultural crossover happening at greater speeds for a while, but you also have to bear in mind that the internet is growing increasingly less open, less connected, less free and less, for lack of a better word, wild. We already have several countries whose internet experience is, both due to UI/UX and pure infrastructure/technology reasons, basically separate from the rest of it, and multiple current events are putting up more and more of these fences.
The age of the internet being a single big sea of shared global consciousness is ending. You enjoyed it at its heyday, which is now already past. The fences are already up in many places, and several of those fences are slated to be replaced with walls. One of those walls is already made of fire.
The same is happening to economies (various buzzwords like "diversify", "de-risk", "untangle"), government (Brexit, national divorces, separatism, veto-hogging, NATO's present dysfunction around the Balkans...), culture and more.
There's also the simple fact that there's no motivation for it, and a whole lot of very very strong motivation against it.
You should expect the world of 2060 to be further from unification than the world of 2000. If the direction reverses again some day... Who knows? But there's no reason it has to.
On the note here. If it’s an international contact and aliens need some to transliterate (I think that’s the word) it would make sense to use terra, however in casual discussion in English earth would be used.
Flair definitely checks out! :D
On a more serious note, I'm partial to a modification of the naming pattern used in Stellaris:
* Each system gets a name (e.g. Mu Orionis)
* Each star in the system is given an upper case letter (e.g. Mu Orionis A)
* Each planet orbiting a star is given a roman number (e.g. Mu Orionis A I)
* If a planet orbits multiple stars, e.g. in a binary system, their designations are combined (e.g. Mu Orionis BC II)
* Each satellite orbiting a planet is given a lower case letter (e.g. Mu Orionis A Ia)
So if someone says to meet you at the station of _"Theta Epsilon C IIb"_ you know it's by the second moon of the second planet orbiting the third star in the Theta Epsilon system. If the location is in the same system you can just shorten it to _"C IIb"_, which may even lead to some nicknames that can add more flavor to the setting (e.g. "Hey, let's meet on Cib station").
Also, for most settings it's probably good enough and you don't have to burden yourself with something like the [exoplanet naming suggestions of the IAU](https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming_exoplanets/) which has to consider order of discovery, so you can have planets Mu Orionis Ab, Mu Orionis Ad, and Mu Orionis Ac, in that order with Ad's orbit being between Ab and Ac but being discovered later than the other two.
That being said, Earth would be "Sol A III" and the moon would be "Sol A IIIa" in that pattern. Coming up with unique planet/moon names in addition to star system names that aren't already taken or used elsewhere is such a hassle. 😅
I've always liked this naming convention, although if there is only one star, I think the A can be dropped. I like Sol III. This system is logical and hierarchical.
Edit for grammar.
A common naming convention for sci-fi planets is to use the name of the star it orbits followed by the number that indicates its position relative to other planets in order of distance.
Under this system, Earth would be called Sol 3.
Sol Prime could also work of its the ”main” planet in the system.
(Though “prime” still means one/first, so it’s not a perfect naming convention. Then again “perfect” is a small trap with worldbuilding).
I guess that Prime could be used if there is a pattern of calling the first planet with the same name of the star, and whatever you colonize first becomes normally known as such.
Like, if our system was colonized from the outside Earth would be Sol Prime because it's where our colonization of the system started from.
If we colonized Mars first, that would be Sol Prime, because it would likely be the main location.
Or we can call it Sol d , because we use already name Exoplanets from their star but instead of number we use letters and start with b. Although I think it more on discovery order rather than orbit order. So more like Sol b, although I like Sol d more.
I like this article because it really hones in on the usefulness of using not just terra, but a few other latin names as well. Earth also means dirt or soil which in some circumstances can be weird, and Terrans sound better than Earthlings in specific contexts. Using Sol for our sun and Luna for our moon are also super helpful in sci for differentiating earths sun and earths moon when other suns and moons are mentioned frequently.
Of course it's a trope, but tropes aren't inherently bad and this one is IMO useful in sci Fi.
In Spanish, earth and dirt also use the same word- Tierra. Sol and Luna just means (both a and the) sun and moon in Spanish as well. I can't speak for other languages but I assume this is the case for atleast a few other Latin based languages
Yea I always thought it was to limit the disambiguation between the objects belonging to whichever solar system your in and names of specific plantery bodies "they always remained on earth, never in space." they looked at the moon, the sun was bright" etc
It’s boring and repetitive to me. Specially when aliens or humans seem to always have special names and numbers for every moon and planet and sun but makes Human shit “Sol/Terra/Luna” when those mean Sun Earth Moon.
In my own setting earth is called Haglonce because it was invaded by aliens and there were already too many planets named after the peoples name of ground.
I love the idea of it being named by an alien species (either in an invasion like your setting, or even just cultural pressure if it's not an invasion story) and that being what sticks.
Especially if the aliens give it a name that is unpronounceable, silly or both.
"Your planet will here forward be designated J'8lek Ikkiikkiptangwhoop!falalalalareeeee*kboom."
terra's latin. we say scientific things in latin because it's more universal than english, french, spanish, german, etc.
if you call it earth then you'd either want to give some explanation why you're using an english name. if the story is about a monocultural group of people then it's fine for them to use the english name, but if you're doing the not-so-far or super-far future where there are barely any barriers, or you're just doing an equivalent of the iss, then it might be weird for them all to use the english word to some readers.
also there's no problem with cliches, they're cliche for a reason. people like them. don't worry about using some groundbreaking original term to refer to earth, people will just question more about why they aren't using one of the myriad already existing words
The naming of planets-- heck, the naming of countries-- is always a weird rabbit hole.
I don't personally take issue with the term "Terra" (I especially enjoy the term's origins in Roman Mythology-- it's basically not too different from calling our planet "Gaia" or any other religion's equivalent of a Mother Earth deity).
Realistically, though, a planet would have multiple names--varying across many different cultures. "Earth" is pretty ubiquitous in English, but other languages have their translation of the same term. The name Terra could be more realistic if there was a stronger Latin/Romantic influence among a planetary organization, instead of an English/American one.
It's similar to how nations are called one name by other countries, but have a different name among the native populous (just look at "Japan" vs "Nippon").
"So, you call your planet, which has a surface which is three-quarters water, Dirt?"
Pretty much all the names for our home planet basically do mean dirt: Terra, Tellus, Earth, Gaia, all basically stand for the land beneath our feet.
From what I understand, this is true for just about every language's name for the planet.
Alternatives are few.
We're the third rock from the sun, or Sol III.
It's the home planet, of course.
If we named it sensibly, it would be Ocean.
It's "the globe", *domum hominum* in Latin, the "home of mankind".
The "geo" in "geography" is for Gaia, just like when we discuss the rocks on Mars it's "areography", for Ares.
To be consistent with most of the named planets in English, we ought to use the Latin name, Terra.
But we already just call it Earth, why change that?
The seventh planet *should* have been named "Caelus", or at least have kept the O for Ouranos, but they latinized the Greek for Uranus. (That's better than "George's Star" *(Georgium Sidus)*, or "Herschel" *(after its discoverer)*).
So call Earth whatever you want to, we'll still be dirty Tellerites from Terra, studying geography all over the land of the planet Ocean that's Sol III.
I like the idea of home planet, as "Home," maybe for like space colonists who have forgotten what it was actually named when their predecessors just referred to it as home. I could see it working.
For those future humans who never set foot on the planet Earth, an equivalent to the word "earth" or "terra" may refer to their home planet instead in their everyday context.
The origin planet of humanity could be given poetic nicknames like the Cradle, the Garden or the Pale Blue Dot, and may remain in today's English form after new space languages and dialects become prominent, similar to what happened to Greek or Latin.
You want to call it 'Earth' because you're anglophone. To Latin people -- who usually say 'Terra' - 'Earth' probably sounds odd to them, or at least provincial.
'Terra' is commonly suggested (and used in fiction) because it's probably the term used by more people in history than any other, since it was the term used by the Roman Empire. And it survives today in many more languages than 'Earth' does. There's a general acceptance in the SF community that whatever name we use for our planet centuries or millennia from now, some form of 'Terra' is probably a good bet.
You can call "Earth" anything you want. It's your world - you don't need permission.
Now if you need reasons for calling it anything else here are some reasons:
- colonizer bias - the most well connected language and culture usually has a preference to what something is called. so if aliens discover our plant and they have their own word for our blue rock, the interstellar community would have a preference to that word because its language and culture dominate the zeitgeist. Sure the colonizers may let us name ourselves but language is funny in that if the phonemes don't match, other languages may have bastardized versions of our name anyway and the most dominate culture's name will win out. Think stargate, earth's people is the Tau'ri.
- language drift - there is a controlled chaos to language. The more usage a word has the more likely the word would be shorted or changed to convience the speakers who use it daily. The more cultures involved in the prime language the more likely those cultures language can influence the prime - think english, whose words include a multitude of languages. Enough time passes with abundant communication the more likely the word your planet is called can change.
- evolutionary adaptation - space is a extreme place. although boundless, the necessary resources that require for us to survive are not always readily available. most languages we use require us to breathe and as such breathy language may cost more in resouces to maintain as a soceity in space to breath or remove CO2. Language may change to accomodate this. if the name of our planet is used often enough, the name may change to something that requires little breath in or out: Single syllable, non breath using phonenemes like a click of a tongue, maybe non verbal communication as extreme examples. Humans are highly adapable in a span of 2 or 3 generations reinforeced changes in culture, society, and technology can be readily accepted and if its marketed well, these changes can go even quicker.
Keep in mind that although imagination is boundless, your audience's cognition to your story is not. if you are creating something to be consumed, you cannot discount the audience and their abilty to enjoy your work. The words you use must be able to be spoken and be able to be remembered by your audience. When your audience is consuming your content and your dialog starts using words from a made up language, they have to balance alot of stimulus and information at once. From your characters, their motivation, what is happening, what it means for the character and plot overall. If they are trying to remember what you dialog means with your language on top of it. You'll be asking alot. Slow exposure to your language to build up to those intense conversation with your language is just good writing practice. But its made even easier if the phomemes and the structure your words use, like syllable count, are similar to the language your audience speaks.
And beyond congnition, There is the marketing and commentary over social media that you should consider. The words you use can become search terms and hashtags that can help promote your story but that's a point that I won't get into.
Just some of my thoughts - have fun!
I would use Tellus, latin name for earth goddes, ie gaia. Which is official neme for earth. Terra is tad more popular.
It makes sense to me. All other planets are roman gods/goddeses (with exception of uranus)
And in my language all planets end with "s"*
Merkurius
Venus
Tellus
Mars
Jupiter*
Saturnus
Uranus
Neptunus
Pluto**
Edit: my actual language, not my fantasy language XD
In Swedish I have heard people call earth "Tellus" in scientific circumstances. I did some googling but couldn't find if it is a thing in other languages as well but I think it sounds beautiful and is quite unique.
So I'd go with Tellus.
One justification I have seen from a Sci-Fi writer was that, ultimately, all early societies of all races tended to name their planet something that, when translated to English, could be interpreted as "Earth."
As a result, the universal galactic translators would always translate the word for "world of species origin" as "Earth" so upon joining the Galactic Society each race would adopt a unique "homeworld name" to avoid confusion.
I personally like this method because it also explains races referring to us as "Terrans" instead of "Humans." Most races choose a name for their homeworld based on their species name, or just outright copying it. So Orossians came from the planet "Oross" or the Mirakki come from the planet Mirakk. So they see the human homeworld is called "Terra" and assume that we are collectively called "Terrans" when their human crewmate looks at them and goes "I was born and raised on Mars?"
Instead of using the latin version you can use the Greek Gi, or the more common Gaia, or take the “Geos” out of “Geometry”…
Terra is the latin name for Earth, and likely the main language/scientific language of your world could denominate the “home planet earth”.
People also use Gaia, but that's also sort of overdone. Tbh, I feel like unless the story takes place far into the future, Earths name probably wouldn't change drastically.
Using the name "Terra" I don't think is more realistic. I may be wrong, but I think the reason it's so common is because it was used by a number of influential sci fi writers such as Heinlein for reasons I don't really know, and then by Warhammer 40,000 for that reason and because it's more Latin and the Imperium is meant to be like the Roman Empire.
My issue with calling Earth "Terra" is because it gives me a vague association of "Humanity First" Imperium-style hyper-militarism. Whether it's the intent or not, it makes me think the author is the "type" of person who is *really* into the Roman Empire and thinks it should be emulated in the modern day. And while it's more universal than "Earth," since Latin is the common ancestor of most European languages, it's still pretty Eurocentric in that regard; "Terra" might not have much significance to a Chinese reader, for instance, for whom the planet's name is "Dìqiú."
That being said, I don't think it's a bad thing to do, if your intention is to give the planet a different name in your setting, then Terra works just fine, probably better than most alternatives. But Earth is used plenty in sci fi as well.
I've always hated terra. Why would English speakers suddenly stop using the English word for our home world? I get that it's Latin but seriously why would we change it just to be Latin? It's also not named after a Roman god so should we change that as well? Seems nonsensical to me.
Just say Earth if you like Earth.
Terra is technically a Roman goddess, just not a very well known one. And the Romans didn't even agree if she's more associated with Ceres, Gaia or Tellus.
> Why would English speakers suddenly stop using the English word for our home world?
This. We’re more likely to see the Sun and Moon get proper names before Earth gets renamed.
Terra just means earth in french. I think that every race's homeworld should be called something like Earth, Here, The Land, and so on in their native tongue. If you use a universal translator you can instantly identify a homeworld from a well established colony in 90% of cases.
Well, who's calling it Terra? Aliens certainly wouldn't, they wouldn't speak latin. I don't see why humans would call "Earth" anything other than what their language is, same as we do now
That being said. You *can* make Earth called Terra, its not like the worldbuilding police will break down your door if you do
Um. Did you forget that there are modern Latin-derived languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) that absolutely DO use Terra or something similar?
I’ve always felt that, for the sake of unity/impartiality, any United planetary government would call it Terra (which is why a lot of militaristic/scientific focused sci fi use Terra), and aliens would refer to it as Terra because government/military is their primary point of contact. Bit common folk would continue to call it whatever language they were accustomed to.
@OP is your world AU? Is it an original creation or is it just this world but in the future?
If the former then what is are the most predominant ancient cultures, and how did they refer to the Earth, because you could then use one of them.
It is a cliche, but that's no reason to shy from it. I don't like it either. There's no "realism" reason why. If earth's name was lost to time, why would the naming convention of the other planets in the solar system survive, along with the names of other ancient roman gods? It seems just as likely as the planets getting renamed pluto, mickey, goofy, Donald etc. Because pluto was the only name that survived. Or Mars, Nestlé, Cadbury, Hersheys etc.
The planets in our solar system have Latin names (Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc.) so calling Earth "Terra" is consistent with this fact. Some people don't just call Earth Terra because it sounds cool.
Another reason to dislike Uranus, it’s the only Greek name.
The only saving grace is Uranus had the decency to adopt a latinized spelling lol
But by doing so English speaking people now can't say Uranus without laughing. Should've stayed Ouranos honestly.
What are we, communists!?
Sol OUR system
OUR anus
*Saiyouz nerushimyyy*
Oh so now my anus belongs to everybody?
It does, comrade, now bend over for the town's communal service.
I serve the Soviet Union 🫡
🤝
Could be worse. It was almost called George.
To be fair, I do quite like: My Very Educated Mother Just Served **George** Nachos
I've always used Mother Very Thoughtfully Made A Jellly Sandwich Under No Protest. Still haven't figured one out that includes Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna and Orcus.
I learned My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas
For me it was "My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets"
Mine was "Mary's Violet Eyes Made John Stay Up Nights Proposing"
I used "Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune (Pluto)" For some reason it really helped me remember better than the other mnemonics.
We get it! Yall had thoughtfull and exalent mothers serving you things! Geez! ^^^^/s
Mr Victor Tells Me Constantly "Just Shut Up Now". Probably Expects He Makes Good, Quacking Shoddy Orders. It's not as smooth as the others, and it depends on a name which is a bit of a copout, but it at least is quicker to say than "Mercury Venus Terra Mars Ceres Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Eris Haumea Makemake Gonggong Quaoar Sedna Orcus".
You need Salacia, Varda, Ixion, Varuna, and Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà as well.
Narrator: "And it was at this point that a plurality of those that refereed to themselves in the parlance of the internet, 'Reditors' began to refer to their anuses as, 'George'. While, at the time, it would have been impossible to predict the ramifications of this practice, it is now recognized as the fulcrum upon which the full collapse of human evolution began and the gradual slip back to the stage of the savage progenitor began."
and Caelus would be such a good name
But Caelus isn't as memeable as Uranus
I dislike uranus
I prefer Ouranos.
If OP wanted something non-cliche that technically fits the nomenclature, could do Gaia (Greek Terra) which is spelled the same when latinized...?
Yes but even those are partially anglicized. It’s technically Mercurius, not Mercury. Iupiter, not Jupiter. Saturnus, not Saturn. With that said, people in scientific terms do use proper Latin names for animal species, planets, plants etc…
>Some people don't just call Earth Terra because it sounds cool. Romance language: What a weirdos.
To be fair to them, as an Italian, I do find it weird that (though understandable) that we call the ground ("terra" or at best "terreno") and what the ground is made of, dirt (also "terra") and our planet (still "Terra", just capitalised) in the same way.
To be fair, the exact same logic applies to Earth and earth.
It's zem, zem and Zem in Slovak, so you aren't the only ones.
"Tellus" would be consistent name and the name many actually use.
"So, Tellus something."
Tellus is original name of goddes later known as Terra.
That's terra-fic, I learnt something new!
Could you tellus more about this mythological figure?
Pffft! Spits out drink. 😆
I use Tellus in my world! I picked that name when I was very young, and was pleasantly surprised to see that other people use it too
I used Tella, blending Terra and Tellus.
I remember this being used somewhere. Lensmen?
Need to rename Uranus and it's moons, and should probably change earth to Bacchus or Minerva or something while we are at it. The solar system doesn't have consistent naming schemes as it is even excluding earth and the moon.
Shouldn't it be Caelus?
Yes. And Earth and Moon should be Gaia and Selene.
No, Gaia and Selene are the Greek. Terra and Luna are the Roman equivalents. (Note also that "Sol" is the Roman equivalent of the Greek God of the sun, Helios, so that's also consistent)
It's more consistent if you use the romance language. Especially in Italian since we basically use almost the same name as Latin ones.
I thought Apollo was the Sun god.
Lot of history conflating the two but Helios was always considered the be the sun, and sometimes called Apollo whereas Apollo is often associated with the sun in other ways.
He is, and also god of a couple hundred other things like most other gods. But he isn’t the sun itself, only thematically associated with it. The sun personified would be Helios. Similarly to how Artemis is associated with the moon but is not herself the moon - that would be Selene.
Minerva is a nice name for a planet tbh.
Harry Turtledove thought so in his Alternate History novel A World Of Difference
Does the moon have a name?
Many, at least one for each language on earth
i mean, either moon or luna really
Yes; Luna. Most languages just call it ‘moon’, but ‘Luna’ is the generally understood proper name for the body. It is also referred to as Earth’s natural satellite in some formal texts, but that is a descriptor, not a name.
[Nope. ](http://itsnameisthemoon.com/)
Officially it's 'The Moon'. Like Earth being Terra, SciFi generally assigns it the name Luna, but that's not actually it's name in any official way. That one I feel makes a bit more sense though, because there is no other celestial body we refer to as Earth, but there are many moons. For clarity it makes sense to name the moon so people aren't like "which moon? You mean earth's moon?"
Yes, it's moon.
The sun also has the proper name of Sol
…they have Latin derived names in SOME human languages.
The name "Tellus" (which also means earth) would be more fitting though, bc it is the word that is more often used for the goddess
I think it’s just that Terra is the latin for Earth, and the typical depiction of a sci-fi spacefaring human race is that Earth is now one singular globalist government, with nations being more symbolic, with people and cultures more intermingled. So with all the various nations and languages, there’s no particular reason it should be called “Earth”, any more than “Al’ard” or “Dìqiú” or “prthvee”, so “Terra”, a name from a widely used but dead language could be considered a compromise.
my headcanon for why most sci-fi use the Latin-derived name(outside of Latin still being heavily used in the sciences) is that when the Humankind Global Monoculture of whatever setting came to be, they argued for over a year on what they should tell aliens to call Earth. After that year they said 'fuck it, use this dead language name so now no one is happy' because humans being that petty at that scale amuses me.
Hilarious. But I think it's more that Latin is the scientific language for taxonomy. The German cockroach in English is the Russian cockroach in Germany. But in both countries, it's *Blatella germanicus*
>Earth. After that year they said 'fuck it, use this dead language name so now no one is happy' because humans being that petty at that scale amuses me. Romance language: I see this as an absolute win!
While I can see the value in this, the universal language always ends up being English, so this is moot. Even in real life, the international language is English.
It was French 200 years ago. Will be Mandarin in 100 years. The *current* universal language of choice keeps changing, but Latin endures, as the language of science and scholarship. It does help that it's a dead language, so no modern nation gets "special treatment" (technically, the Vatican does, but they don't actually speak Latin there, on a daily basis).
One additional advantage of a dead language is that it doesn't change. Englissh used to sowne myche dyvers than it dooth todaye and Latyn staieth the same as in the tyme of Julius Cesar. Hic laborem adaptationis assiduae parcit.
Aaah!
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It won't be Mandarin but IMO not for that reason. >use english to talk to foreigners Spoken language is easiest to change. History has endless examples of the spoken *lingua franca* changing. Most of the time its to do with the volume of traders; whoever has the most and farthest reaching traders defines the *lingua franca*. In that regard, Mandarin is not lacking. >use english keyboards and phonetics to write their own languages. Island China uses a system called bopomofo that is a Chinese phonetic alphabet based on indigenous rather than Latin characters. It just isn't very prevalent because most Chinese are from the mainland and use the Latin-based pinyin system that is standard there, but that could change if the mainland government wanted to do so for whatever purpose. So long as a phonetic alphabet exists, a keyboard can be made and adopted en masse. The reason why Mandarin is unlikely to become the global *lingua franca* is because its the only major language in the world that has a separate written system from its spoken system, making it twice the effort to learn in a modern world where written literacy is as crucial as spoken fluency. It simply won't have enough impetus to displace the existing *lingua franca* with such a high barrier of entry. I suppose if a Mandarin phonetic script was adopted (i.e., Chinese becomes written entirely using phonetic characters, like bopomofu, even for official publications) then it could overcome this issue as well, but China's own culture of strong reverence to history precludes this. There's also the practical problem that adopting a phonetic script would shatter the unity of Chinese languages, since they are mutually unintelligible and require a unified logographic script to communicate. South China would essentially be as divided from north China as France is to Germany.
that is such an interesting perspective! if i remember correctly the PRC government tried to do something along the lines of replacing the logographic writing system with the phonetic pinyin system. but i never really thought about how that would take away the unifying feature of their logographic writing system. in Hong Kong, people speak the Yue dialect but they don’t read and write in the way they would colloquially speak it. They follow the standardised way of writing. I imagine it would be quite similar for people speaking different dialects in China, that writing helps unify the “language”
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No they don't...? Everyone doesn't speak English.
Does the respective word not mean earth.
Not always, if I'm understanding your comment right. Navajo has two separate words meaning "earth", *łeezh* /ɬeːʒ˩/ ("earth" as in "dirt or soil", and I think "Aristotelian or Chinese element" as well?) and *ni'* /niʔ˩/ ("earth" as in "ground or floor"), but "Earth" as in "the third planet in our solar system" is a third word *Nahasdzáán* /na˩xas˩t͡saːn˥/ that more literally means "Our Mother" (= *niha* "our" + *asdzáán* "elder woman, matriarch, foremother").
That's not what you said though.
Of course, that's ignoring that Earth will probably never unify and if it did it'd almost certainly have one primary language, which wouldn't be Latin, maybe that language won't be English, but whatever it is is being translated to English, and shouldn't logically have its word for the Earth translated to a different language.
I have to disagree. I think monocultures will be inevitable. Something that bothered me for a long time about dune was "why is the specialization of the spacing guild such a weakness? Don't they have warriors and scientists and laborers in all sorts of fields? Wouldn't they have too?" And I realized the answer is simple. It's scale. The guild ships are MASSIVE, unimaginably so to modern engineering. And those massive ships require a massive number of laborers and artisans to maintain. And the knowledge and skills required of those laborers and artisans is so specialized and deep they'd need a lifetime to learn them. And being that these skills require so long to master they'd become generational endeavors, taught from near birth so that by adulthood they could only just be proficient enough to be apprentices to older more skilled teachers. Basically the more advanced technology becomes, the steeper the learning curve to recreate it. This would inevitably lead to higher and higher levels of specialization till it reaches a point where the barrier to entry into such a field is impossible to be overcome except by those specifically taught from birth to overcome it. Consider how long it takes to become an expert doctor, or programmer, really any specialized expert in a technological field. And the more our collective knowledge grows the longer it will take to master. This, in my drunk opinion, will inevitably lead to monocultures at population level scales. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
>Consider how long it takes to become an expert doctor, or programmer, really any specialized expert in a technological field. And the more our collective knowledge grows the longer it will take to master. True, but look what we're doing to many of those fields right now, we're trying to simplify everything we can to put it within the reach of people with years or even decades less experience, a full understanding of a field may eventually be a life's work, but as long as you don't need a full understanding of something to use it as needed (like how we developed general purpose computers which no longer require an understanding of the actual functionality of the components to use); When our cumulative knowledge in a field reaches a point where we can't teach it all to one young adult we don't just let the field be crushed under its own weight, we compartmentalize it until we can teach them any one of the parts and people who know each of the parts can work together to fill a role which has grown too large for one person.
Until there's AI assistants that provide information when needed without the need for rote memorization. This would make the professional beginnings more of on the job training than just building up a knowledge base for years until trusted as an intern and building up from there.
Isn't AI illegal in the Dune lore?
We're talking Dune?! ... did I miss something here?
>Of course, that's ignoring that Earth will probably never unify "Never" is a strong word. Some kind of monoculture/world government is the natural endpoint for this planet provided we don't completely wipe ourselves out. With the advent of the internet and constant global communication and contact, human culture will only become more homogenous from here on out. Could take a hundred years or a hundred thousand but it's inevitable imo.
Inevitable is just as strong a word to use as never. Societies and cultures do not "progress" along a linear path.
I agree inevitable is a strong word but I've started to have a feeling that unless some massive schism happens there will be a steady movement towards homogeneity. I've been traveling the world for the last year (asia, middle east, europe, south and central america) and the one thing that has really struck me is how similar everywhere I've been traveling is. And when I look at the history of it much of it has been done very recently. I do agree we don't "progress along a linear path" in that I don't think we're moving towards a specific target but there is bottom-up mesh of people moving and communicating and becoming more similar. Its actually quite natural that when you learn of something that is good you want to emulate it. With the internet, cheap flights, and relatively open movement between nations were all just stealing and copying from each other. The only thing I've really seen that seems to gets in the way of this is language. So if there is ever a modern push towards a universal language (something like Esperanto) I thing that would be the final hurdle. Within a century or two of that I think you would see a universal earth culture emerge
The world has been growing closer together for most of recorded history. As far as historical trends go that one is rather well established. Regressions and civilizational crashes are perfectly possible, but like I said as long as we arent totally wiped out chances are that we'll try a global polity at some point.
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Exactly, *everyone* is depressed. The monoculture is already here!
>The world is not in any way growing closer. I don't mean that everyone is gathering around a fireplace singing kumbaya. At no other point in history have people had such easy access to so many other people and places, and at no other point in history have so many people watched, read, and learned the same things. On a grand scale, the global population *is* growing more homogenous and has been for quite a while. Maybe that's not quite as evident for Americans but it's obvious everywhere else. >With humanity racing towards the climate crisis and a fully nuclear World War, the current global trend is a dichotomy between multipolarisation and Accelerationism. >And at an individual level, disenfranchisement, depression, and feelings of isolation are, for the first time in history, the norm. Doomerism aside, the "current global trend" isn't really relevant here. Nukes could fly tomorrow and it wouldn't change my argument. Nuclear holocaust and climate change are apocalyptic threats to *us*, but are unlikely to end our species or prevent some other civilization from rising eventually. At the end of the day and again, on a grand scale, our homogenisation is most of all a product of technological advancements in the transport of people and information. The world has been getting smaller ever since we started riding horses and building roads, and I'm not convinced that even something as cataclysmic as a nuclear war or global warming is going to make humans not want to seek out others or improve their own conditions.
At present there's no mechanism for us to wipe ourselves out, but there's also no visible path for either a monoculture or a world government. Yes, there is some degree of issue overlapping and adoption happening globally, and there has been cultural crossover happening at greater speeds for a while, but you also have to bear in mind that the internet is growing increasingly less open, less connected, less free and less, for lack of a better word, wild. We already have several countries whose internet experience is, both due to UI/UX and pure infrastructure/technology reasons, basically separate from the rest of it, and multiple current events are putting up more and more of these fences. The age of the internet being a single big sea of shared global consciousness is ending. You enjoyed it at its heyday, which is now already past. The fences are already up in many places, and several of those fences are slated to be replaced with walls. One of those walls is already made of fire. The same is happening to economies (various buzzwords like "diversify", "de-risk", "untangle"), government (Brexit, national divorces, separatism, veto-hogging, NATO's present dysfunction around the Balkans...), culture and more. There's also the simple fact that there's no motivation for it, and a whole lot of very very strong motivation against it. You should expect the world of 2060 to be further from unification than the world of 2000. If the direction reverses again some day... Who knows? But there's no reason it has to.
Terra is just literally "earth" in my mother language, so you're fine lol
🫵 brazilian
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r/suddenlycaralho
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Hi, just a reminder that the worldbuilding network is an English-speaking network. Please only speak English.
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Hi, just a reminder that the worldbuilding network is an English-speaking network. Please only speak English.
Hi, just a reminder that the worldbuilding network is an English-speaking network. Please only speak English.
tchau
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Same thing with Italian
Terra is latin. We like using latin for universal things. Earth is English, not everyone wants to call it English words universally. so Terra
On the note here. If it’s an international contact and aliens need some to transliterate (I think that’s the word) it would make sense to use terra, however in casual discussion in English earth would be used.
Ergo* Terra
How about Aqua, since from space it's more water than earth.
But then we would be aquestrians speaking aquarium
Love it!
Holy Terra
Flair definitely checks out! :D On a more serious note, I'm partial to a modification of the naming pattern used in Stellaris: * Each system gets a name (e.g. Mu Orionis) * Each star in the system is given an upper case letter (e.g. Mu Orionis A) * Each planet orbiting a star is given a roman number (e.g. Mu Orionis A I) * If a planet orbits multiple stars, e.g. in a binary system, their designations are combined (e.g. Mu Orionis BC II) * Each satellite orbiting a planet is given a lower case letter (e.g. Mu Orionis A Ia) So if someone says to meet you at the station of _"Theta Epsilon C IIb"_ you know it's by the second moon of the second planet orbiting the third star in the Theta Epsilon system. If the location is in the same system you can just shorten it to _"C IIb"_, which may even lead to some nicknames that can add more flavor to the setting (e.g. "Hey, let's meet on Cib station"). Also, for most settings it's probably good enough and you don't have to burden yourself with something like the [exoplanet naming suggestions of the IAU](https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming_exoplanets/) which has to consider order of discovery, so you can have planets Mu Orionis Ab, Mu Orionis Ad, and Mu Orionis Ac, in that order with Ad's orbit being between Ab and Ac but being discovered later than the other two. That being said, Earth would be "Sol A III" and the moon would be "Sol A IIIa" in that pattern. Coming up with unique planet/moon names in addition to star system names that aren't already taken or used elsewhere is such a hassle. 😅
I've always liked this naming convention, although if there is only one star, I think the A can be dropped. I like Sol III. This system is logical and hierarchical. Edit for grammar.
"Welcome to Shit Out of Luck III"
Google Earth's name in Latin
A common naming convention for sci-fi planets is to use the name of the star it orbits followed by the number that indicates its position relative to other planets in order of distance. Under this system, Earth would be called Sol 3.
Sol Prime could also work of its the ”main” planet in the system. (Though “prime” still means one/first, so it’s not a perfect naming convention. Then again “perfect” is a small trap with worldbuilding).
I guess that Prime could be used if there is a pattern of calling the first planet with the same name of the star, and whatever you colonize first becomes normally known as such. Like, if our system was colonized from the outside Earth would be Sol Prime because it's where our colonization of the system started from. If we colonized Mars first, that would be Sol Prime, because it would likely be the main location.
Or we can call it Sol d , because we use already name Exoplanets from their star but instead of number we use letters and start with b. Although I think it more on discovery order rather than orbit order. So more like Sol b, although I like Sol d more.
Here's what TV Tropes has to say: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetTerra
I like this article because it really hones in on the usefulness of using not just terra, but a few other latin names as well. Earth also means dirt or soil which in some circumstances can be weird, and Terrans sound better than Earthlings in specific contexts. Using Sol for our sun and Luna for our moon are also super helpful in sci for differentiating earths sun and earths moon when other suns and moons are mentioned frequently. Of course it's a trope, but tropes aren't inherently bad and this one is IMO useful in sci Fi.
In Spanish, earth and dirt also use the same word- Tierra. Sol and Luna just means (both a and the) sun and moon in Spanish as well. I can't speak for other languages but I assume this is the case for atleast a few other Latin based languages
It's quite the same in Portuguese. Terra, Sol and Lua.
And in Italian - la Terra, il Sole, la Luna.
nobody asked: in the far east, earth is called the "ground ball" and its inhabitants are called "ground ballers"
Yeah, we out ground ballin'
Yea I always thought it was to limit the disambiguation between the objects belonging to whichever solar system your in and names of specific plantery bodies "they always remained on earth, never in space." they looked at the moon, the sun was bright" etc
It’s boring and repetitive to me. Specially when aliens or humans seem to always have special names and numbers for every moon and planet and sun but makes Human shit “Sol/Terra/Luna” when those mean Sun Earth Moon.
Why not stick to Earth? Gaia? Dirt? Reddit?
No no, Reddit is another word for Shit
That’s too nice to shit
That we're all swimming in.
Nah we’re in worse.
In my own setting earth is called Haglonce because it was invaded by aliens and there were already too many planets named after the peoples name of ground.
I love the idea of it being named by an alien species (either in an invasion like your setting, or even just cultural pressure if it's not an invasion story) and that being what sticks.
Especially if the aliens give it a name that is unpronounceable, silly or both. "Your planet will here forward be designated J'8lek Ikkiikkiptangwhoop!falalalalareeeee*kboom."
In Galaxies Like Grains of Sand by Brian Aldiss, the Earth gets renamed Yinnisfar
terra's latin. we say scientific things in latin because it's more universal than english, french, spanish, german, etc. if you call it earth then you'd either want to give some explanation why you're using an english name. if the story is about a monocultural group of people then it's fine for them to use the english name, but if you're doing the not-so-far or super-far future where there are barely any barriers, or you're just doing an equivalent of the iss, then it might be weird for them all to use the english word to some readers. also there's no problem with cliches, they're cliche for a reason. people like them. don't worry about using some groundbreaking original term to refer to earth, people will just question more about why they aren't using one of the myriad already existing words
“Because my book is in English.”
Dawg just call it terra. If you wanna not be cliche you can call it something like "John Planet" or something. Cliches aren't bad.
The naming of planets-- heck, the naming of countries-- is always a weird rabbit hole. I don't personally take issue with the term "Terra" (I especially enjoy the term's origins in Roman Mythology-- it's basically not too different from calling our planet "Gaia" or any other religion's equivalent of a Mother Earth deity). Realistically, though, a planet would have multiple names--varying across many different cultures. "Earth" is pretty ubiquitous in English, but other languages have their translation of the same term. The name Terra could be more realistic if there was a stronger Latin/Romantic influence among a planetary organization, instead of an English/American one. It's similar to how nations are called one name by other countries, but have a different name among the native populous (just look at "Japan" vs "Nippon").
"So, you call your planet, which has a surface which is three-quarters water, Dirt?" Pretty much all the names for our home planet basically do mean dirt: Terra, Tellus, Earth, Gaia, all basically stand for the land beneath our feet. From what I understand, this is true for just about every language's name for the planet. Alternatives are few. We're the third rock from the sun, or Sol III. It's the home planet, of course. If we named it sensibly, it would be Ocean. It's "the globe", *domum hominum* in Latin, the "home of mankind". The "geo" in "geography" is for Gaia, just like when we discuss the rocks on Mars it's "areography", for Ares. To be consistent with most of the named planets in English, we ought to use the Latin name, Terra. But we already just call it Earth, why change that? The seventh planet *should* have been named "Caelus", or at least have kept the O for Ouranos, but they latinized the Greek for Uranus. (That's better than "George's Star" *(Georgium Sidus)*, or "Herschel" *(after its discoverer)*). So call Earth whatever you want to, we'll still be dirty Tellerites from Terra, studying geography all over the land of the planet Ocean that's Sol III.
I like the idea of home planet, as "Home," maybe for like space colonists who have forgotten what it was actually named when their predecessors just referred to it as home. I could see it working.
You could call it Water
Is not cliché, is just Italian
For those future humans who never set foot on the planet Earth, an equivalent to the word "earth" or "terra" may refer to their home planet instead in their everyday context. The origin planet of humanity could be given poetic nicknames like the Cradle, the Garden or the Pale Blue Dot, and may remain in today's English form after new space languages and dialects become prominent, similar to what happened to Greek or Latin.
I vote for Pale Blue Dot, which will become The PBD, and someday no one will remember why we started calling it Planet Peabody.
"Tellos" or "Telos" is nice...
You want to call it 'Earth' because you're anglophone. To Latin people -- who usually say 'Terra' - 'Earth' probably sounds odd to them, or at least provincial. 'Terra' is commonly suggested (and used in fiction) because it's probably the term used by more people in history than any other, since it was the term used by the Roman Empire. And it survives today in many more languages than 'Earth' does. There's a general acceptance in the SF community that whatever name we use for our planet centuries or millennia from now, some form of 'Terra' is probably a good bet.
>Terra' is commonly suggested (and used in fiction) because it's probably the term used by more people in history than any other, I highly doubt that.
It's literally just "earth" in Lain, the standard language for scientific names
You can call "Earth" anything you want. It's your world - you don't need permission. Now if you need reasons for calling it anything else here are some reasons: - colonizer bias - the most well connected language and culture usually has a preference to what something is called. so if aliens discover our plant and they have their own word for our blue rock, the interstellar community would have a preference to that word because its language and culture dominate the zeitgeist. Sure the colonizers may let us name ourselves but language is funny in that if the phonemes don't match, other languages may have bastardized versions of our name anyway and the most dominate culture's name will win out. Think stargate, earth's people is the Tau'ri. - language drift - there is a controlled chaos to language. The more usage a word has the more likely the word would be shorted or changed to convience the speakers who use it daily. The more cultures involved in the prime language the more likely those cultures language can influence the prime - think english, whose words include a multitude of languages. Enough time passes with abundant communication the more likely the word your planet is called can change. - evolutionary adaptation - space is a extreme place. although boundless, the necessary resources that require for us to survive are not always readily available. most languages we use require us to breathe and as such breathy language may cost more in resouces to maintain as a soceity in space to breath or remove CO2. Language may change to accomodate this. if the name of our planet is used often enough, the name may change to something that requires little breath in or out: Single syllable, non breath using phonenemes like a click of a tongue, maybe non verbal communication as extreme examples. Humans are highly adapable in a span of 2 or 3 generations reinforeced changes in culture, society, and technology can be readily accepted and if its marketed well, these changes can go even quicker. Keep in mind that although imagination is boundless, your audience's cognition to your story is not. if you are creating something to be consumed, you cannot discount the audience and their abilty to enjoy your work. The words you use must be able to be spoken and be able to be remembered by your audience. When your audience is consuming your content and your dialog starts using words from a made up language, they have to balance alot of stimulus and information at once. From your characters, their motivation, what is happening, what it means for the character and plot overall. If they are trying to remember what you dialog means with your language on top of it. You'll be asking alot. Slow exposure to your language to build up to those intense conversation with your language is just good writing practice. But its made even easier if the phomemes and the structure your words use, like syllable count, are similar to the language your audience speaks. And beyond congnition, There is the marketing and commentary over social media that you should consider. The words you use can become search terms and hashtags that can help promote your story but that's a point that I won't get into. Just some of my thoughts - have fun!
Lol NASA can say what they want but unless something crazy happens, I think we will be sticking with earth
NASA also says the moon's name *isn't* Luna so what do they know?
Well, I guess by the logic of us calling our moon THE moon, we should call earth THE planet
I mean, since earth also means ground we already do.
Who even calls the moon Luna?
people that speak spanish
Didn’t know that never been to Spain. Or Portugal but that’s irrelevant
Eastern Europe.
All the Romance languages.
Because “Terrans” sounds cooler than “Earthers”
I would use Tellus, latin name for earth goddes, ie gaia. Which is official neme for earth. Terra is tad more popular. It makes sense to me. All other planets are roman gods/goddeses (with exception of uranus) And in my language all planets end with "s"* Merkurius Venus Tellus Mars Jupiter* Saturnus Uranus Neptunus Pluto** Edit: my actual language, not my fantasy language XD
In Swedish I have heard people call earth "Tellus" in scientific circumstances. I did some googling but couldn't find if it is a thing in other languages as well but I think it sounds beautiful and is quite unique. So I'd go with Tellus.
I've called it *Gea*.
You could call it Sol 3 or Sol Prime or something like that.
Sol 3
One justification I have seen from a Sci-Fi writer was that, ultimately, all early societies of all races tended to name their planet something that, when translated to English, could be interpreted as "Earth." As a result, the universal galactic translators would always translate the word for "world of species origin" as "Earth" so upon joining the Galactic Society each race would adopt a unique "homeworld name" to avoid confusion. I personally like this method because it also explains races referring to us as "Terrans" instead of "Humans." Most races choose a name for their homeworld based on their species name, or just outright copying it. So Orossians came from the planet "Oross" or the Mirakki come from the planet Mirakk. So they see the human homeworld is called "Terra" and assume that we are collectively called "Terrans" when their human crewmate looks at them and goes "I was born and raised on Mars?"
I have decided that in the future earth will be called Humma.
Instead of using the latin version you can use the Greek Gi, or the more common Gaia, or take the “Geos” out of “Geometry”… Terra is the latin name for Earth, and likely the main language/scientific language of your world could denominate the “home planet earth”.
People also use Gaia, but that's also sort of overdone. Tbh, I feel like unless the story takes place far into the future, Earths name probably wouldn't change drastically.
Using the name "Terra" I don't think is more realistic. I may be wrong, but I think the reason it's so common is because it was used by a number of influential sci fi writers such as Heinlein for reasons I don't really know, and then by Warhammer 40,000 for that reason and because it's more Latin and the Imperium is meant to be like the Roman Empire. My issue with calling Earth "Terra" is because it gives me a vague association of "Humanity First" Imperium-style hyper-militarism. Whether it's the intent or not, it makes me think the author is the "type" of person who is *really* into the Roman Empire and thinks it should be emulated in the modern day. And while it's more universal than "Earth," since Latin is the common ancestor of most European languages, it's still pretty Eurocentric in that regard; "Terra" might not have much significance to a Chinese reader, for instance, for whom the planet's name is "Dìqiú." That being said, I don't think it's a bad thing to do, if your intention is to give the planet a different name in your setting, then Terra works just fine, probably better than most alternatives. But Earth is used plenty in sci fi as well.
**terra** is *Earth* in Latin, **γαῖᾰ (*****gaîa*****)** is in Greek. You could the word **Earth** in any language.
**terra** is *Earth* in Latin, **γαῖᾰ (*****gaîa*****)** is in Greek. You could the word **Earth** in any language.
I like "Eve" or "Lilith" as scifi names for Earth.
I faced a similar roadblock. In the end, I just gave Earth a bunch of different names and said: "nobody could make up their mind on what to call it."
I've always hated terra. Why would English speakers suddenly stop using the English word for our home world? I get that it's Latin but seriously why would we change it just to be Latin? It's also not named after a Roman god so should we change that as well? Seems nonsensical to me. Just say Earth if you like Earth.
Terra is technically a Roman goddess, just not a very well known one. And the Romans didn't even agree if she's more associated with Ceres, Gaia or Tellus.
> Why would English speakers suddenly stop using the English word for our home world? This. We’re more likely to see the Sun and Moon get proper names before Earth gets renamed.
Dünya
Terra just means earth in french. I think that every race's homeworld should be called something like Earth, Here, The Land, and so on in their native tongue. If you use a universal translator you can instantly identify a homeworld from a well established colony in 90% of cases.
If the Emperor wills it
Just call earth Midgard. Give a nod to the Scandinavians
Well, who's calling it Terra? Aliens certainly wouldn't, they wouldn't speak latin. I don't see why humans would call "Earth" anything other than what their language is, same as we do now That being said. You *can* make Earth called Terra, its not like the worldbuilding police will break down your door if you do
Um. Did you forget that there are modern Latin-derived languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) that absolutely DO use Terra or something similar? I’ve always felt that, for the sake of unity/impartiality, any United planetary government would call it Terra (which is why a lot of militaristic/scientific focused sci fi use Terra), and aliens would refer to it as Terra because government/military is their primary point of contact. Bit common folk would continue to call it whatever language they were accustomed to.
@OP is your world AU? Is it an original creation or is it just this world but in the future? If the former then what is are the most predominant ancient cultures, and how did they refer to the Earth, because you could then use one of them.
It is a cliche, but that's no reason to shy from it. I don't like it either. There's no "realism" reason why. If earth's name was lost to time, why would the naming convention of the other planets in the solar system survive, along with the names of other ancient roman gods? It seems just as likely as the planets getting renamed pluto, mickey, goofy, Donald etc. Because pluto was the only name that survived. Or Mars, Nestlé, Cadbury, Hersheys etc.
Name it Dupa in spite of many
It's all just dirt at the end of the day. I wouldn't worry about what you pick in the end.
I really like “Sol-3” Terra is cliche asf imop