Markup View

Author: elwoz

Nov 1st 2011 at 11:46:10 AM

Ooh, this has all kinds of interesting layers to it.

* "Earth" is a slightly more highfalutin' word for "dirt", yeah. It's meant all three of: the ground, the substance the ground is made of, and the entire world (the world occupied by humans, that is, as opposed to, say, Asgard and Jotunheim) all the way back to Proto-Germanic.  [footnote: "dirt" meaning the substance the ground is made of is quite recent; it comes directly from a Middle English word that meant "excrement"!]  Latin "Terra" is similar; I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there was a word with roughly the same meaning in PIE, but I don't know (nor do I know about other language families).  It is perfectly plausible that superior aliens would think this is a silly jumble of concepts and/or a name lacking gravitas.
* "Earth", "Terra", and "Gaea" are also the name of a goddess: usually referred to in English as "Mother Earth."  Many (but not all) non-monotheistic religions have a god (often, but not always, female) identified with the world.  So if you want to put a more charitable interpretation on it, we named the planet after one of our oldest and most culturally pervasive gods.  But then again, superior aliens may have OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions and ''still'' sneer at us for it.
* The names that get used in Earth-centric SF for alien species' home planets are often ''names assigned by human explorers'', which are frequently based on the human name for the local star, which is of course ''not'' something as lacking in gravitas as "earth".  (Unless, of course, the star has a catalog number rather than a name.  Then they have to think of something else.)  I recall SpocksWorld being at pains to point out that the Vulcans are willing to accept "Vulcan" as the ''human'' name for their planet and species, but they have other names for both in their own languages.  More recent SF, particularly if it's in a deconstructive frame of mind, has pointed out the UnfortunateImplications in this.
* When SF has its human explorers being more thoughtful and less colonialist, they often adopt the aliens' own names for themselves and/or their own worlds ... which may turn out to be the alien language's equivalent of "earth" or "home" or "world".  (I do not remember the name of the book, but I remember an alien species that used numbers for all their names; their world was "1".)  This is itself assuming that the aliens are enough like humans that they have a similar conceptual system going on, which there's no reason to think StarfishAliens would do.  But then again, if the aliens' conceptual system is too different, it might be impossible for us to communicate with them at all.