9 ms·
Terra means Earth in Portuguese... (and also means soil, land)
by capablanca 17y ago
Terra means Earth in Portuguese... (and also means soil, land)
- tomstuart 17y agoIt's a well-known word for Earth in English, too.
- BearOfNH 17y agoYes, it comes from the Latin. So maybe this is not a coincidence, since Julius Caesar invented the ROT13 cipher.
- lsb 17y agoNo, ROT3, not 13, and he was missing J, V, W.
- skalpelis 17y agoAlso, he had no idea what "earth" means.
- blogimus 17y agoWhat do you imply by that?
- skalpelis 17y agoHe had no idea what the modern English word "earth" means, even if he somehow could have stumbled upon it.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 17y agoGreek astronomers knew the earth was spherical around the 6th century BC (easily deduced by observing ships sailing in the Mediterranean, as well as the visibility of the stars at different latitudes) and had already demonstrated that the moon was a sphere 150 years before Ceasar's reign. Pliny records that Gaius Sulpicius Gallus enjoyed promotion for winning a battle by correctly predicting an eclipse and timing his military action around it, also before Ceasar's birth. Around the same time, Seleucus (who lived in what we now call Iraq) postulated that the earth orbited the sun rather than vice versa. Ceasar himself was interested in astronomy, to the extent that he replaced the previous Roman calendar with the Julian Calendar (a modification of the Egyptian Solar calendar), the first to feature a year of 365 days and and include a quadrennial leap year, which endured for 1500 years before the Gregorian Calendar tweaked the leap year scheme for centenary years; considering that the inaccuracy of the Julian calender only amounted to 3 days over 400 years, it error factor was < 0.001%. Ceasar may not have thought of the earth as just another planet orbiting just another sun in just another galaxy, but it's highly unlikely that he believed the earth to be flat.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- blogimus 17y agoThank you.
- skalpelis 17y agoI suck. I thought we were still talking about rot13-ing words and that I should point out that Julius Caesar could not have known what the modern English language word "earth" means and that it is the same as "terra" in Latin, i.e., a point about historical linguistics instead of astronomy and natural philosophy.
- mahmud 17y agoTerra and Gia are Latin and Greek for Earth.