The origin of the word earth

In German, it is «Erde.» As you may see, it is very closely related to the English «earth.» So, let me check what my etymological dictionary of the German language (Duden Herkunftswörterbuch) says (translated and explained by myself):

The Proto Germanic noun MHG erde, OHG erda, Goth. aírþa, Eng earth, Swe jord is based on IE *er[t-, --] «earth» with related in other IE languages, comp. e.g. Gre érā «earth» (éraze «(turn) to dust»), OIce jorfi «sand[bank]» and W erw «field.» OHG ero «earth» uses the same root. – The word used to be a designation for soil (comp. Black Earth, wet soil [referred to as «wet earth» in some languages]) first, then for the ground (e.g. ground floor [referred to as «earth floor» in some languages]). Moreover, «Earth» is the mainland, on which the people live, as opposed to «Heaven» and is eventually used for our planet.

MHG = Middle High German
OHG = Old High German
Goth. = Gothic
Eng = English
Swe = Swedish
IE = Indo-European
Gre = Greek
OIce = Old Icelandic
W = Welsh

Hope it helps.

Well, if your source is right the word goes back all the way to Proto-Indo-European. English didn’t borrow it from Arabic.

Terra is what it’s called in Latin, and all languages derived from it.
As far as I know… perhaps Romanian uses a different word — yep, but they also say terra.

Remember also Gaia, in Greek (Ge in modern Greek, apparently).

P.S. It’s Daear in Welsh (related to Terra?) Can you think of a prettier name for a planet?

In Irish I believe it is Tir (or that may just mean land) and apparently Tir is related to Terra, so I would guess (with no knowledge of linguistics ) that the Welsh is related itself to Terra.

Well, terra can mean «earth» or «land».

I knew that, I just wasn’t sure if »Tir» had the two meanings.

Hi
here is the word «earth» in some Slavic languages:

Czech: země
Slovak: zem
Russian: zemlja
Polish: ziemia

In other Slavic languages it’s going to be very similar.

Okay, after all your posts and by help of some dictionaires and Wikipedia, I’m going to present you an overview about the different derivatives, cognates, and roots of the word «earth» in several language families:

For the Indian languages, the root is p-v-th, I think:

Gujarati: પૃથ્વી (privTii)
Hindi: पृथ्वी (privTii)
Marathi: पृथ्वी (privTii)
Nepali: पृथ्वी (privTii)
Bengali: পৃথিবী (privTii?)

T = aspriated t
ii = long i vowel
the r is vocalic, as far as I know

I can’t read the other Indian languages, but the above look all very similar. As I don’t know the words for the other languages, I don’t want to conclude that the word is «privTii» throughout all Indian languages, particularly since the Urdu word is زمنن (zamiin?).
____

For the Semitic languages, the root is /-r-d(s), as far as I can tell (/ stands for an initial vowel):

Arabic: أرض (arD)
Hebrew: ארץ (arez)
(Kurdish: erd) not really a Semitic language, not sure if it’s correct here
____

For the Slavic languages, the root is z(i)em-, concluding from the examples (but I’m not sure where the «l» on Russian and Bosnian comes from).
____

For the Turk languages, they use the root y/sh-r, I think (Chazzwozzer may elaborate upon this topic):

Turkish: yer
Kazakh: Жер (sher)
Azeri: yer
Uzbek: yer
____

For the Germanic languages, the root is Indo-European *er[t]-:

German: Erde (OHG: erda; MHG: erde)
Swedish: jord
Gothic: aírþa
Icelandic: jörðin (Old Icelandic: jorfi)
English: earth (OE: eorþe)
Dutch: aarde
Yiddish: ערד (erd)
____

For the Romance languages, the Proto-Indo-European root *ters- (to dry) is used:

Latin: terra
French: terre
Italian: terra
Esperanto: tero
____

In the Finno-Ugric languages (except Hungarian), the root maa is employed:

Finnish: maa
Estonian: maa
____

In Japanese, they use the characters 地球 (note the similar pronunciation!):

Japanese: 地球/ちきゅう (chikyuu)
Chinese: 地球 (di2 qiu4)
Korean: 地球/지구 (jigu)

There are still some other language families to treat (Amerindian languages; Aboriginal languages, Celtic languages), but I think that’s enough for now. If you find mistakes, please correct them immedaitely.

Hello Whodunit, Kurdish is not a Semetic language, but erd seems to fit in with the IE examples you have given.

You’re right, but it shares some similiarities with the Semitic languagues, as far as I know. Do you agree if I leave it in the column, but with a note that it’s not a Semitic, but an Iranian language?

I don’t want to have it among the Germanic examples, because that would be totally out of place, I think. Let’s wait for others what they have to say.

Japanese, Chinese, and Korean don’t belong to a common language family, but I understand that you grouped them because they have a common Sprachbund (or Kulturbund?)

Yes, I grouped them together because they share the same … (I’d like to say root here, but that would not be correct), let’s say characters. Sprachbund is correct, Kulturbund is something historical that wouldn’t fit here, but I understand why you’re asking.

And I can’t help mentioning Spanish tierra, too.

There are many Romance languages I didn’t mention, because that would clutter up this thread.

By the way, if you know why the «i» was added in Spanish (maybe in private, in a new thread or quickly here), it would be very interesting. Could it be that the «t» was softened by the following «i»?

Thanks for the root of terr-.

I cost me some investigation, but after I knew how I can find it without having an etymological dictionary of Romance languages (if you can provide any, that would be great), I finally found it. Terrain is used in English and German, too, but they are not the words to refer to our planet.

For the Turk languages, they use the root y/sh-r, I think (Chazzwozzer may elaborate upon this topic)
Turkish: yer
Kazakh: Жер (sher)
Azeri: yer
Uzbek: yer
____

An ancient Turkic word is the root: «yér»
Turks usually call the earth «dünya» which is an Arabic loan rather than «yer,» «yerküre,» «yer yuvarı» or «yer yuvarlağı;» whereas some sources still insist on using the Turkic equivalent. Two words for the earth that come to my mind right now, which are not used anymore, are «acun»(ajun: the name for Buddhist incarnation in old Turkic) and «arz»(from Arabic arḌ)

It’s a very characteristic feature of Spanish (along with a few less known minority languages of Iberia): when a Latin short E was in a stressed syllable, it became the diphthong IE in Spanish. This compensated for the loss of vowel length distinctions in Vulgar Latin.

Ah, that’s interesing. That should be the reason why there is «pienso», «tienes» etc. for the first and second person, although the infinitive is «pensar» and «tener». French is rather incosistent about this matter (je pense; je tiens).

Thanks for the information!

Did you manage to find the original meaning of the Germanic and the Semitic roots? That would be interesting.

Hm, I’ve tried to find a better explanation, but all I can find is that the Germanic root is IE *er[t] meaning «earth/soil/ground.» However, I just found something very interesting that confirms what someone else in thsi thread has already mentioned. The Grimm dictionary of the German language explains the origin of «Erde» as follows (translated by myself):

ERDE, f. terra, Goth. airþa, Old Saxon ertha, OE eorðe, OHG ërda, MHG ërde, Middle Dutch erde, aerde, New Dutch aarde, English earth, Frisian irth, Old Norse iörð, Swedish, Danish jord.

1) The origin of such a sweeping, old word gets lost in the dark. Since Latin and the Celtic languages are normally close to our language, one might consider a sound shift: terra, Celtic tir(cf. atír in ZEUSZ 254) is to airþa, ërda as Lithianian darbas is to Gothic arbaiþs or as forma is to μορφη, and we must not forget that the sound shift of the Latin t to the Gothic þ, OHG d is completely regular. Aside from Welsh tir, daear, Armenian (?) douar also count, in which again some changed lingualis (?) could appear. The double rr in terra may, like in curro, susurrus and the like, be accrued from ri. Tellus, the goddess Tellus, does not belong to terra at all.

The text is in older German before the first spelling reform in 1901, so I’m not sure what they mean by «fortgeschobne lingualis». I hope you’ll get the message anyway. There’s, by the way, much more to read about the origin of earth, but it’s all in German and I don’t feel like translating all the stuff.

An ancient Turkic word is the root: «yér»
Turks usually call the earth «dünya» which is an Arabic loan rather than «yer,» «yerküre,» «yer yuvarı» or «yer yuvarlağı;» whereas some sources still insist on using the Turkic equivalent. Two words for the earth that come to my mind right now, which are not used anymore, are «acun»(ajun: the name for Buddhist incarnation in old Turkic) and «arz»(from Arabic arḌ)

Yes, I know dünya, too, because there was a song (dünya dönüyor) in Germany with both German and Turkish lyrics. However, I wanted to use yer in this thread to group it to the other Turk languages.

To get back to the original proposition, of a connexion between the Germanic aard(e)/Erde/earth and the Arabic arD. I used to think that too, but it now seems unlikely to me: just one of those many strange coincidences, I fear.

When I began studying Arabic, I was surprised, too, that the Arabic word was so close to the German one. However, I didn’t think much about it anymore then, because I thought it was either a coincidence or a borrowing from English (or another language) like the Arabic تنك (bank). It turned out to be the former.

Whereas the Germanic root is said to have had the meaning of both soil and abode of Man (before anybody knew the world was round) throughout its history from Proto-Indoeuropean, it is most likely that the Arabic arD comes from the verb raDiy meaning to satisfy or to content in which there is implied a filling up, a completion, a whole.

That might be possible, but here is some more food for thought:

رض (raDDa) = crush — very unlikely
راض (raada) = teach an animal tricks — rather unlikely
روض (rawwada) = tame — quite unlikely, too
روض (raud) = garden — possible
راض (raadin) = satisfied — similar to yours, possible
أضاء (aDaa2a) = light up/illuminate — possible by meaning; unlikely by morphology

I once thought aard might be connected with 3araDa which yields 3ariiD wide and ma3raD exhibition because the world is spread out before us, but I came to believe that to be fanciful too. There are many connexions between Arabic and European languages, but not here I think.

I don’t think that is very likely, because the shift from ع to a vowel (like ا or أ) is not a typical sound shift in Arabic, as far as I know (I might be wrong though).

On the other hand I think it quite likely that تَرْب tarab (the kind of earth that makes your hands dirty) is connected with French tourbe(peat/combustible earth). They can’t all be coincidences.

I wouldn’t question that, but I don’t see how it is relate to this thread. There are many Arabic borrowings in the French language, and, to be honest, I wouldn’t consider tourbe a French word by its looks.

As I said, it isn’t a coincidence, but simply a borrowing.

In Hungarian (which is in the Ugrian branch of Finno-Ugrian group and mostly quite different from the languages in the other branch) it is: föld.

I could imagine that the Finnish/Estonian maa could be connected to our mező (= field), but that is just a guess.

The fact that in Arabic there is a similitude gave me the idea that the root may be somewhere in Sanskrit. As it is often the case with Indo-European languages. (That could also explain why in Celtic languages there is similarity and why in Latin languages there is a difference…)

Il existe un mot sanskrit «tira» qui signifie «rive» i.e la terre par opposition à la mer, là où finit l’Océan de Lait.

Ring any bells among sanskritists?

Je te prie de nous expliquer ce que c’est que l’Océan de Lait (the Ocean of Milk), s.t.p.

Hi,

The similarity between earth and the Arabic word أرض cannot be accidental.

Why not?

However, it should be born in mind that, most modern dictionaries trace the etymologies back to IE,

PIE, maybe? Proto-Indo-European?

and willingly avoid discussion around roots of Mesopotamian origin.

Four questions:
1. Why would they avoid that?
2. Which «modern dictionaries» «willingly avoid» those kind of discussions?
3. What are your arguments that there is a (genetic) relation between PIE and (proto-)Semitic?
4. What do you mean by «Mesopotamian»? It’s very weird to see a word in this context referring to a region rather than to a language.

Mesopotamia has been the cradle of civilisation,

I beg your pardon?

and all languages bear some traces.

Traces of what? Of «Mesopotamian» languages? I’d love to see examples of «traces in all languages» (preferably in a separate thread).

I think the word earth must be traced back to the Sumerian ur, which signifies town, place, area, territory, etc.

Great to learn about what you think. It’s a pitty, though, that you don’t give any sound and solid arguments.

Yes, I am quite skeptic about your claims. And yes, you can always convince me with solid arguments based upon the basic principles of historical comparative linguistics.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Groetjes,

Frank

For the Slavic languages, the root is z(i)em-, concluding from the examples (but I’m not sure where the «l» on Russian and Bosnian comes from).

I can’t give you much in-depth info, but it’s an epenthetic consonant that appeared during the elimination of the consonant cluster *Cj: *mj > ml’

So the proto-Slavic *zem-j-a turned into the Old Church Slavonic form zemlja (similar to the modern Russian).

However, the adjective doesn’t have this l: zemnoj šar («the earth globe»), which is derived from *zem-inos (cf. OCS zemьnъ).

Hi
here is the word «earth» in some Slavic languages:

Czech: země
Slovak: zem
Russian: zemlja (земл̀я)
Polish: ziemia

In other Slavic languages it’s going to be very similar.

Bulgarian: зем̀я (zemia)

So the proto-Slavic *zem-j-a turned into the Old Church Slavonic form zemlja (similar to the modern Russian).

Yes. In Old Slavic, the consonant cluster *Cj, where C is among {b,p,v,m}, in the cases where j is also a consonant, tends to change to *CLj. L is an epenthetic consonant indeed. It has been dropped later in many Slavic dialects.

The Slavic zemja/зем̀я (earth) is related to the Latin words humus and homo.

Please consider that the Latin words homo (man, human) and humus (soil, ground, earth) are really related. Perhaps, there could be some very old influence from Mesopotamia concerning the following idea:

{Genesis 2:7} And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.