• Lvxferre
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      6 months ago

      That ⟨地球⟩ is perhaps the only exception that we’re damn sure on how Earth got its name. The guy who coined the expression was a priest of the Papal States called Matteo Ricci, living in Ming around 1600. He did a living translating works back and forth between Chinese and Latin, and calqued that expression from Latin orbis terrarum - roughly “the globe of soils”, or “the ball of earths”.

      • Codex@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Ancient Chinese mysticism (yijing, wuxing, daoism) have the concept of earth as either kūn (field, like of grass) or di (earth, like soil). I believe both are 地. This is in contrast to Heaven (tian) which is above. I believe both were conceived of as infinite parallel planes.

        天地人 (tiān-dì-rén) are Heaven, Earth, and Human; and were sometimes seen as the 3 primal forces of reality.

        • Lvxferre
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          6 months ago

          Thanks for the further info! That 地 alone does follow the pattern of the other languages.

          Your explanation gives Ricci’s odd calque a lot more sense - he’s using the old term, but highlighting that it’s a ball, not an infinite plane. As in, he was trying to be accurate to the sources, and he could only do it through that calque.