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”.
crandall@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Middle English erthe, from 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.”