Sigh, the halcion days of low standards for The Straight Dope…
This report drew probably more criticism for my lazy reply than practically anything else I ever wrote. You hate me, you really hate me!
Please go back and check out all the fantastic staff reports I wrote - before and since this one - before you judge me personally for it! I agree it wasn’t up to “snuff.”
Jill-okay, OKAY, I’m sorry for the Lame Earth Report!-Gat
My apologies, I missed your post #16 and wasn’t criticizing Jill for her interpretation. I was merely pointing out that the two "Earth"s were the cause of the two different interpretations.
In Polish ‘Earth’ is Ziemia and ‘earth’ is ziemia, which I think answers both possible interpretations of the question. 
An inhabitant of the planet Earth is called Ziemianin.
“This coffee tastes like mud!”
“Well, it was ground this morning.”
I don’t think anyone is sharpening pitchforks yet (plus you get some silver stars for having “tierra” in your location).
My question is, did you really think that the question was whether other languages called the home planet “e-a-r-t-h”. Because that is so stupid a question that although it would deserve the level of answer you gave it, it shouldn’t have been chosen for a staff report (or any other kind of official response).
If you understood that the question was whether other languages called the home planet with the same word they use for dirt and soil, then you must know that you just didn’t even touch on it in your response and tsk-tsk.
ETA: I just noticed that this is some huge zombie (or whatever zombies are called in other languages)
Not entirely. It is a thoroughly wrong notion, but a sufficiently unsophisticated person might think that:[ol]
[li]Earth/planet is truly a name, like “John” or “Rumplestiltskin”, which received “dirt” as an extended sense, or even resembles an independent word earth/dirt out of mere coincidence, and that:[/li][li]Names are never translated (there was certainly a time in my life when I thought that Russians called their capital city “Moscow”, and, in fact, the only reason “Moscow” is as different as it is from “Москва” is that it passed through Polish on the way).[/li][/ol]
Before you claim out of hand that it is still too stupid to believe – I have known an adult with a postgraduate degree and decades of regular professional exposure to Early Modern English who nevertheless believed aye/ever to be the same word as aye/yes, and pronounced them alike, this despite the fact that the two words did not even normally share a spelling until the 20th century; he even had an imaginative and thoroughly wrong definition for it, based on this same error.
Oddly enough, Thai has words for all the planets except this one. Earth is simply referred to as “the world” or “this world.”
But one could argue that all the other ones are names of people and/or gods, and proper names should be capitalized.
For the record, as the knucklehead who originally asked the question about a billion and a half years ago (hiya!), I don’t actually remember if the question was supposed to be more like a) “Do other languages call the planet ‘dirt’?” or b) “Is the proper name ‘Earth’ used for this planet in any language(s) besides English?”
Like I said, this was a billion & ½ years ago, but I’m pretty sure it was one of those. Please pick whichever would be funnier.
You must have misunderstood your question.
If we have a volunteer to write a new Staff Report, focused on etc etc, please email me.
Are we also discussing whether there is a relation between the word for ‘world’ in other languages (monde/mundo/etc) and mountain/mound(/mud)? This is something I’ve been curious about myself.
I think we’re more focused on the name of the planet (Earth) compared to the word for dirt/soil/land/loam (earth.)
The English word “world” comes from OE “wer-ald”, literally “man-age”. (“Wer”, as in “werewolf”, is equivalent to Latin “vir”, and means “man – opposite of woman”. “Man”, in OE, is equivalent to Latin “homo”, and means “man – opposite of beast”. For unknown reasons, “wer” disappeared from English and “man” had to pick up the slack.)
“World” has two main branches of meaning – “era” and “universe”. The “era” meaning has pretty much vanished except in certain stock religious phrases ("…world without end, Amen") and the “universe” meaning has split into many different ones, such as “planet”, “planet Earth”, “society”, “high society”, “subculture”, “all the stuff in your life that isn’t directly evil and isn’t about bodily appetites, but still distracts you from God”, “Old World” vs. “New World”, etc., etc., etc…
In other words, let’s not go there in this thread.
NO!! It’s a Ziemniak 
For what it’s worth on the capitalization question, the convention among astronomers is to use a definite article and capital when referring to a specific celestial body, such as the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the Galaxy, or the Universe, but to omit the definite article and use the lower-case when referring to the categories of objects of which the upper-case ones are the exemplars (thus, for instance, “this telescope could detect another earth up to 100 lightyears away”, or “Saturn has dozens of moons”, or “the de Sitter universe has motion without matter”).
John W. Kennedy said:
Interesting - so only men can be werewolves. What does that make a “woman-wolf”?
Wyfwolf, I think. It’s cognate to modern English “wife”, of course.
Being someone that believed Earth to be a name, what do other countries call the other planets? What do astronomers call the planets when writing international journals?
Let’s call our planet New Jersey. That will keep the evil aliens from attempting to conquer our planet and enslave us all.