Who named earth?
Terms that refer to the Earth can use the Latin root terra-, such as the word terrestrial. There is also the alternative Latin root tellur-, as used in words such as telluric, tellurian, tellurion and Tellurium. Both terms derive from the Roman goddess Terra Mater, who was also called by the presumably more ancient name Tellūs Mater. Scientific terms such as geography, geocentric and geothermal use the Greek prefix geo-, derived from Terra Mater’s Greek counterpart Gaia. The English word “earth” has cognates in many modern and ancient languages. Examples in modern tongues include aarde in Dutch and Erde in German. The root also has cognates in extinct languages such as ertha in Old Saxon and ert (meaning “ground”) in Middle Irish, derived from the Old English eorðe. All of these words are derived from the Proto-Indo-European base *er-. Given metathesis, we can find cognates of “earth” between terra and the modern Romance languages, for instance tierra in Spanish or terra in Portuguese.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020806232116/http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn-old/archive2001/posts/November/topic504399.shtm “The word ‘earth’ is from old germanic roots meaning ‘the ground’ and extended to the ground we live on between heaven and hell. The planets were recognised from their appearance in the night sky and were named different things by different cultures. In English, we followed the conventions of the Romans in planet naming but stuck with our germanic past for the Earth, rather than the Latin terra. Once we realised that we were in fact on a planet orbiting the sun, the name for our home area, earth, was extended to the planet. This is purely a convention in the English speaking world. Other languages call it other things. Interestingly, those cultures that have their own names for the planets still accept the standard names ( Mercury, Venus, Mars etc and all accept Uranus, Neptune and Pluto as these cannot be seen by the naked eye and were named by their discove
