Markup View

Author: Fantomas

Nov 1st 2011 at 9:19:52 AM

Just out of interest, does this trope only work because sci-fi is primarily an English-language genre? This planet is often alternatively referred to as Terra, which in the original Latin means "ground" rather than "soil". Do other languages unrelated to Latin, such as Chinese, usually call this planet something that translates directly as "soil", or even "ground"?

Also, referring to the Earth as "ground", as opposed to "sky", was based on the assumption that this planet comprised the only patch of ground that living, breathing humans ever would or ever could walk upon, so it didn't need to be distinguished from all those other bits of ground up in the sky that nobody knew about. In the same way, tribes with small territories who only know about one lake or mountain or whatever seldom bother to give it an individual name, therefore a great many place-names in Africa can be literally translated as "Lake Lake" or "Mount Mountain".

Therefore it's reasonable to assume that many alien races would begin by calling their native world something that means "the ground we stand on", and stick with the accepted yerm long after they became aware that other worlds existed. Though perhaps a race who had colonized the stars a very long time ago would dump the archaic word and instead use something that meant "home" or "origin". At any rate, you would expect a race's own name for its homeworld to be the least imaginative name they have ever given to a planet. Aliens who sneer at us for calling our planet "Dirt" probably come from somewhere whose name literally means "Everything".

Of course, this doesn't invalidate the trope; I'm just saying.