Just a small correction on the article’s (http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mearth.html) translation for the Russian version of the word. I had to go through several character encodings, but when i finally got one that looked right, and not like some sort of encrypted WWII message, it said “земл” while it should be “земля.” Might be a browser character error on my end, or a translator error, or a bad copy-and-paste job, or who knows? Just wanted to point that out.
On a side note, I just wanted to say tha this site has really gotten my attention with all of its uncanny answers to uncanny questions. I stumbled upon it while trying to find an image of cheddar cheese-flavored cup noodle, and the article caught my eyes. Now, here I am posting in the forums. Hopefully, I’ll remember to visit the site again and read more of the articles.
As for the correction, is it possible it’s a gender error? I’m not an expert in Russian, but when I recently burned a CD of Russian trance music for a friend of mine, she noted that below the track listing I’d written “??? ??? ???”, where since she is female I should have written her last name as “???”. Could this be similar?
I tried to go to the Global Internet Translator as mentioned in the original article to see where the text-- rendered as “çåìë” on my end-- came from originally and got nowhere. I assume the rendering in the online version of the column is the issue…?
And, of course, Jill missed on French, where “world” as a noun is “le monde” – “mondiale” being the adjective form, as in “world news.”
“Zemlya” (I refuse to try to embed Cyrillic) is “land” – “mir” is world, along with several other meanings. I would not be at all surprised to find “zeml” meaning “earth” – Russian has several masculine/feminine related-word constructions where the feminine noun is the specific object form of what the masculine is the generic substance word for.
Intriguingly, there is quite a bit of wordplay in Hebrew relating “earth” (the substance) to “man” – DM being the basic root, giving rise to “adamah” the soil, “Adam” as the name of the first man and “adam” being the generic for man (=human being), with Esau’s name being changed to Edom as the eponymic ancestor of the country Edom, which like Georgia in the U.S. is characterized by red soil, parallelled to Esau/Edom’s ruddy complexion and red-brown head and body hair. A Hebrew scholar would have to comment, though, on whether the DM root in some variant extends to “the Earth” in the sense of “God created the heavens and the earth.”
Yep, for last names, you do add an “a” or “ya” at the end for females, but nouns are only affected by the verb tense and plurality.
As far as I know, “zemlya” is only a feminine noun. The closest thing to “zeml” that you would use is “zemel,” if you were referring to earth (as in land, not the proper noun referring to the planet) from the third person plural i.e. “those lands,” and even then, you could use “zemli,” but that all depends on the tense of the verb in the sentence. Anyway, I think I even confused myself on that, but the point is, “earth” only has one gender in Russian, so it must be “zemlya.”
FTR, exhaze’s Cyrillic is the only encoding that displays properly in my browser - the SDStaff article’s Cyrillic encoding does not, which I’d like to bring to the SDStaff’s attention.
Heh heh. Since I switched out of the MDiv program at school, I thought my two semesters of Hebrew would never come in useful. Let’s see here. <Pulls out Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
. Hey, this stuff still makes a little sense to me! I might not be doing the transliteration perfectly, but it’s close enough for anyone to read. Erets is earth, and it obviously lacks the DM root. It’s spelled Aleph-Resh-Tsade. According to my lexicon (Holladay, 1998), besides refering to the earth as a whole, it can also mean ground, land or territory. Adamah (Aleph-Resh-Mem-He), means ground or soil, but can also be used for land a person owns. Ish ha-adamah is a farmer, or a “man of the soil.” It is very similar to the words for human and the color red, as you noted.
Oops, I should have paid more attention. The second word in Genesis is bara, Bet-Resh-Aleph, he created, not cara. I knew it looked/sounded wrong, and I should have caught it, but I swear I looked at it twice and I still saw a Kaf there (which is transliterated K, anyway, not C). Plus, I was focused on the end of the sentance, not the begining. Sorry.
While we are commenting on this article, I must say that I find it to be somewhat unsatisfying. Jill mostly just mocks the questioner’s poor framing of the question. The mocking is fine by be – it’s a long-standing Straight Dope tradition that I would miss dearly were it to go away.
However, generally the mocking is followed by an answering of the actual underlying question, which in this case I would take to be something along the lines “In other languages, is the name for this planet also a word for dirt, as in English, or does it commonly have a proper name all its own, like ‘Fred’, ‘Grundlepucknia’, or ‘Pookie’?”
Greek: ge pron. “yee.” (So “George” means the same as ish ha-adamah.)
German: Erde
Scandinavian (esp. Danish): jord, pron. “yoord.”
For those who don’t remember the Bizarro characters in the Superman comics, the equivalent of the Daily Planet on the Bizarro World was the Daily Htrae.
(Also, in the Supeman comics’ letters page, the editos once said that in Kryptonese, Krypton means “Earth.”)
