Guild Wars 2

I’m quite confused, not sure if this is a mistake or meant to be. I thought the planet we are on in GW2 is Tyria?

Why are there so many references to “earth” in-game? No Character in the game would even know what earth is because nothing like that exists in this universe, and the root world would be ‘Terra’ to describe the planet right? Unless I’m confused about something in the lore, hope someone can clear it up!

The root word would only be ‘terra’ if Tyrians spoke Latin, which they do not. The noun ‘earth’ was used to describe the actual substance of dirt/land/etc long before the Earth, capital E, was a standard term for our planet. If you think about it, before we thought of our world as a planet and realised there were other planets, the earth was just what we stood on. ‘Earth’ as one of four elements links back to ancient Greek philosophy as well as being included in numerous other cultures’ elemental schemes.

So no, it’s not that simple, and Tyria being the name of the world does not change the inclusion of earth as an element, as far as I can see.

Curuniel pretty much covered this. Earth in this regard is merely reference to the element, the ground they are walking upon, not the planet, which is indeed called Tyria.

This has been discussed before. The planet is called Tyria and is a name. Therefor it is not translated from new krytan to english. When they talk bout e.g. soil or ground the word is translated to english calling it earth.

From a lore perspective it would be making sense if the game was in new krytan. But then again. I don’t speak it. And even among the lore-specialists only a few have mastered the translation and afaik none is fluent in it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lore/water-wind-fire-and-earth/first#content

Earth means two things: our world’s name, and it is another name for the ground itself (a synonym with soil, rock, dirt, etc.). Tyrians only use it in the sense of the later – as opposed to saying “Soil Magic” or “Dirt Magic” which would TBH, sound really bloody silly.

mercury ranique.2170:

From a lore perspective it would be making sense if the game was in new krytan. But then again. I don’t speak it.

Neither do the NPCs. New Krytan is the written alphabet, not the spoken language. That’s referred to as “Human” (or, by non-continental Tyrian humans, as “Tyrian”).

And we have no pronunciation of what the Tyrian spoken language would sound like. We can guess what Canthan sounds like, from GW1, but it was similarly never given voice overs.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lore/water-wind-fire-and-earth/first#content

Earth means two things: our world’s name, and it is another name for the ground itself (a synonym with soil, rock, dirt, etc.). Tyrians only use it in the sense of the later – as opposed to saying “Soil Magic” or “Dirt Magic” which would TBH, sound really bloody silly.

I personally like the concept behind “Mineral Magic”. It’d encompass all types of mineral including metals and crystals as well as their properties

As far as earth being a synonym for ground, well we did base their language off of ours. They even say some slang words we use so why not ‘slang’ for dirt?

Pretty much what Curuniel said. The term “earth” was used to describe the land we stood upon long before we even knew what a planet was. Although we commonly refer to our home planet as Earth, many people consider Terra to be the “official” name for our planet, largely because it forms the basis for a lot of land-related terms (terrain, territory, etc) and because Latin is the base language many modern European languages were built upon, including English, which happens to be the most prominent language worldwide. Also, Terran sounds cooler than Earthling.

So, the people using the term “earth” in game are referring to the ground and nature, not the world.