'Flat-earther' in your language

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overdrive1979

Member
European Spanish
Nowadays there are a lot of flat-earthers supporters on the internet, specially among conspiracy theorists who often pull themselves away from mainstream society ilogically while they prefer to trust only their cohort believers.

How would you say that word in your language?

In my mother langue we say "terraplanista" which is a compound adjective word derived from two words, just the noun "tierra" which means "Earth" and the adjective "plana" which means "flat".
Therefore, someone who thinks that "la tierra es plana" is a "terraplanista", but not "tierraplanista", which doesn't exist in Spanish.

I just want to know if other Romance languages have the same kind of compound word, but also native speakers from other language families are also welcomed to join this thread.
 
    • The flat-earth supporters are specifically called «οπαδός/οπαδοί της επίπεδης γης» [o̞paˈðo̞s̠.ˌt̠is̠e̞ˈpi.pe̞ðis̠ˈʝis] (sing.), [o̞paˈði.ˌt̠is̠e̞ˈpi.pe̞ðis̠ˈʝis] (pl.) --> supporter(s) of flat-earth.
    It's a mouthful so, we don't use it as much. We prefer the mediopassive participle for them, «ψεκασμένοι» [p͡s̠e̞kaˈz̠me̞.ni] (pl.) --> lit. the besprinkled ones because the majority of flat-earthers also believe in chemtrails (that the contrail of an aircraft flying at high altitude is in reality a biological agent sprayed upon the masses to manipulate them).

    Some etymolgy:

    -MoGr «οπαδός» [o̞paˈðo̞s̠] (masc. or fem. the neuter is not used at all) --> follower, supporter, fan < Classical «ὀπηδός» /opɛːˈdos/ (masc. or fem.), Doric «ὀπᾱδός» /opɐːˈdos/ (masc. or fem.) which prevailed in Koine --> follower, accompanier, attendant, a deverbative from the verb «ὀπηδεύω» /opɛːˈde.u̯ɔː/ (Attic or Classical Gr), «ὀπᾱδέω» /opɐːˈde.ɔː/ (Doric or Koine Gr) --> to follow, accompany, attend, an o-grade derivative of the deponent v. «ἔπομαι» /ˈe.pomɐi̯/.

    -MoGr adj. «επίπεδος, -δη, -δο» [e̞ˈpi.pe̞ðo̞s̠] (masc.), [e̞ˈpi.pe̞ði] (fem.), [e̞ˈpi.pe̞ðo̞] (neut.) --> flat, plane, level < Classical adj. «ἐπίπεδος, -δος, -δον» /eˈpi.pedos/ (masc. or fem.), /eˈpi.pedon/ (neut.) --> plane, superficial, on the ground, a compound: Prefix & preposition «ἐπί» /eˈpi/ + neuter noun «πεδίον» /peˈdi.on/.

    -MoGr mediopassive participle «ψεκασμένος, -νη, -νο» [p͡s̠e̞kaˈz̠me̞.no̞s̠] (masc.), [p͡s̠e̞kaˈz̠me̞.ni] (fem.), [p͡s̠e̞kaˈz̠me̞.no̞] (neut.) --> the one besprinkled upon < ByzGr verb «ψεκάζω» /p͡seˈkɐ.zɔ/ < Ancient Greek «ψακάζω» /p͡sɐˈkɐ.s͡dɔː/ --> to drip, spray, drizzle, a denominative from the ancient 3rd declension feminine noun «ψακάς» /p͡sɐˈkɐs/ (nom. sing.), «ψακάδος» /p͡sɐˈkɐ.dos/ (gen. sing.).
     
    Note that there is the derogatory and rather slang English term 'a flerf' for someone who who espouses flat earth views. (For the sake of balance, they call those holding the majority opinion, 'ballers'. I've been watching too many Sciman Dan videos on YouTube!)

    Like Greek, I suspect Cymraeg/Welsh doesn't have a succinct term here, so, I suppose we would use something like:

    person sy'n meddwl bod y Ddaear yn fflat
    person who-is PRED. thinking being the SOFT MUTATION Earth PRED. flat
    'a person who thinks that the Earth is flat'

    pobl sy'n meddwl bod y Ddaear yn wastad
    people who-are PRED. thinking being the SOFT MUTATION Earth PRED. SOFT MUTATION level
    'people who think that the Earth is level'
     
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    Russian pl. плоскоземельщики (ploskozemél'schiki), also pl. плоскоземельцы (ploskozemél'tsy), "flat-earth-ers".

    Formally, сторонники идеи плоской земли (storónniki idéi plóskoy Zemlí), "supporters of the idea of flat Earth".
     
    In Italian it's "terrapiattista" (for both men and women), very similar to Spanish: "terra"="earth"/"piatta"="flat". Plural is "terrapiattisti" for men and "terrapiattiste" for women.
     
    symposium said:
    In Italian it's "terrapiattista" (for both men and women), very similar to Spanish: "terra"="earth"/"piatta"="flat". Plural is "terrapiattisti" for men and "terrapiattiste" for women.
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    In Spanish is "terraplanista" for both man and woman in singular, and the plural is "terraplanistas" for both men and women.

    I wonder if other western and northern Germanic languages have very similar words to the English one "flat-earthers".
     
    @overdrive1979.

    If you follow @Yendred's link in #5 you will find versions in German, Portuguese and Galician amongst your 'missing' languages. However, maybe it would be best to verify with native speakers first. (And, yes, I do know that PT and GAL are not Germanic languages ... :) )

    And by extension, here are two more English terms for a 'flerf':
     
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    I think the 1876 English term "flat-earther" came from the belief that Europeans in the middle ages thought the Earth was flat. That is a myth. Nobody ever thought that. Ancient Greek scientists determined that Earth was a sphere, and calculated its size. That knowledge was never lost.

    The myth was launched in the very popular 1828 book "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus", by Washington Irving (the "Rip Van Winkle" writer). In the book, Irving has the church elders warning Columbus not to sail west to reach India, saying that if he did, he would sail off the edge of the flat earth.

    In reality, church elders warned Columbus not to sail west to reach India, because the distance was too far and his people would run out of provisions and die. They were correct: Columbus was less than halfway to India, almost out of provisions, when he encountered a then-unknown island in the Caribbean. Foolishly, he thought he had reached an island near India. That's probably why the natives were called "indians".
     
    dojibear said:
    Ancient Greek scientists determined that Earth was a sphere, and calculated its size.
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    Yes indeed, and quite precisely. Eratosthenes calculated a circumference of 39375 km*, while the real number is 40070 km, so a 1.7% error.

    (*) by comparing the angle of the Sun at two distance-known locations.

    And despite this great ancient achievement, there are still wackos in the 21th century, who think the Earth is flat...
    What did Einstein say about human stupidity? :rolleyes:
     
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    dojibear said:
    That is a myth. Nobody ever thought that.
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    That's also a myth. The idea of flat earth never disappeared from the popular picture of the world in the first place, being also conveniently supplemented by some Biblical texts. The educated people (i.e. less than 1%) were aware that Earth is "round" and apparently most of them understood it as spherical. However, as Wikipedia neatly sums it up,
    the work of these intellectuals may not have had significant influence on public opinion, and it is difficult to tell what the wider population may have thought of the shape of the Earth if they considered the question at all.
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    I read an article reviewing several of the oldest societies. According to the article, none of them had the belief that the earth was a flat thing with an edge. That does not mean they thought it was a sphere. There might have been no standard concept of "the whole earth" and its shape, in those cultures.

    Any sea-going culture in the distant past (Phoenicians, Chinese, Indians, Vikings...) knew that the earth was not flat. As you travel out to sea, tall objects are still visible while the lower parts are hidden by the ocean. Things don't just get smaller, like they would if the ocean was flat. This is everyday knowledge familiar to a large number of people.

    But that does not imply a sphere. I've read that the Greek scientists who figured that out used shadows at different latitudes, along with some fairly advanced geometry. Which probably gave rise to the American saying "Geometry? It's Greek to me!"
     
    Flat-earthers are called أصحاب نظرية الارض المسطحة lit. the followers of the theory of flat earth
    In the Quran it roughly says that God spread out the earth for us humankind and implanted the mountains as stakes or wedges into the ground so that the earth can never be shaken.
    Something similar seems to have been already mentioned in the bible (see here)
    Psalm 104:5: “Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.”
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    The Quran clearly mentions in multiple verses how God spread out the earth, whatever this means. Islamic scholars were already aware from the earliest times of Islam that the earth is not flat and tried to reinterpret the verses. However, because of that you still find some muslims defending the flat-earth theory based on the verses of the Quran, but they are for sure not the majority.
     
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    dojibear said:
    I read an article reviewing several of the oldest societies
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    I'm afraid I have no choice but to doubt its credibility. The very phrasing 'the oldest societies' (like, the hunters and gatherers who lived 100.000 years ago?) only reinforces those doubts. It's common knowledge that Ancient Egyptian mythology tells of the flat earth covered by the skies like by a dome (it's even reflected in some depictions). It's basically the same with Old Norse mythology (see the creation myths from the Prose Edda), and even with Chinese astronomy (until relatively late times), and it seems to be the most popular picture historically. Sometimes Earth was seen as a disc and sometimes as a rectangle, the sky were occasionally percieved as a sphere rather than as a semicircular dome, but either way Earth was flat. In fact, wherever we have the firm understanding that Earth was percieved as spherical, we can connect that idea to the spread of Greek culture (in India, for instance, the idea of round Earth appears in astronomical treatises many centuries after Alexander's conquests). The reason, of course, is that the idea of round Earth is extremely counter-intuitive and wasn't really required for the astronomical or other practical purposes of the antiquity (even naval navigation was still too primitive to have any use of it).
     
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    dojibear said:
    Which probably gave rise to the American saying "Geometry? It's Greek to me!"
    Click to expand...

    "American"? :confused:

    'It's Greek To Me', Meaning & Context

    ‘It’s Greek to me’ has a long history as an idiom, and has an interesting origin. The ancient Romans were bilingual. They spoke Latin as an everyday language but the “posh” people used Greek. And then, in the Middle Ages, the use of Greek began to decline and Latin remained as the language of both the educated and the ordinary people. The scribes in the monasteries, working away, making copies of precious books in both ancient languages, began to hand the Greek books to Greek language experts as many young monks couldn’t understand Greek. They would make a note: “Graecum est; non legitur,” which means “This is Greek: it can’t be read.” It would then be copied by an expert.

    “Greek” began to mean anything that can’t be understood. In that sense it became an idiom, first in Latin, and then in English, as a direct translation from the Latin. It didn’t have to have something to do with the Greek language, but with anything someone didn’t understand.

    (In Shakespeare's time also you had the equivalent, "It's all Welsh to me", which fortunately has died out. :)
     
    Awwal12 said:
    Ancient Egyptian mythology tells of the flat earth covered by the skies like by a dome (it's even reflected in some depictions)
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    And for old sources to say what it is not, one expects the idea existed elsewhere: "I thought that I had found in Anaxagoras someone who would teach me the cause of the things that are in accord with my mind, and who would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round" (Loeb; Perseus); "not spread into flat plains but fashioned into a sphere [...]. That is why it is impossible to behold all the constellations in every part of the world" (Astronomica, s. I AD).

    It seems odd for all Mayans to also have believed the world was flat, but that is beyond the thread. :p
     
    Welsh_Sion said:
    Note that there is the derogatory and rather slang English term 'a flerf' for someone who who espouses flat earth views. (For the sake of balance, they call those holding the majority opinion, 'ballers'. I've been watching too many Sciman Dan videos on YouTube!)
    Click to expand...
    I've never heard 'flerf' or (for the people holding the majority opinion) 'baller' in American English.
     
    Dutch does not know that concept. I never come across the term or an equivalent when I read newspapers. I suppose we do not give that group a name. Maybe we might refer to them as "ontkenners", i.e., "dis/un-knowers", deniers...
     
    This one is interesting, I didn't think we had a term in Romanian for flat-earthers (or for globeheads for that matter).

    In the odd articles they are mentioned, it's mostly a sort of unfortunate calque or "adepții teoriei pământului plat" (adherents of the flat Earth theory), but it seems informally they're called platist - platişti (flatist/s). Oh, and globist - globişti (spherist/s).
     
    Awwal12 said:
    The very phrasing 'the oldest societies' (like, the hunters and gatherers who lived 100.000 years ago?) only reinforces those doubts. It's common knowledge that Ancient Egyptian mythology tells of the flat earth covered by the skies like by a dome (it's even reflected in some depictions).
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    In shamanic cultures of Siberia (Nganasans, but I think other nations as well), there is "the lower world" and "the upper world". But it is doesn't mean any kind of disk or plate moving in the outer space, but it refers to, let's say, different layers. When one gets into some other reality (or, if you like, a hallucination - however the trick is that one is able to have the same hallucination again and again), everything can be different there, but they still have some spatial and other associations - otherwise they would have difficulties with addressing all they have seen in their memory. It is like if I said "the outer space is that above my head". From a strict astronomic point, it is not completely right, but from a simplistic human standpoint it is true, especially in the sense of opposing stars and planets to the ground below one's feet.

    So whatever people used to say long ago (people, not individual courtier speculators of modern times) it just cannot be about "Earth" in our notions. Actually, "flat Earth" is itself a kind of oxymoron: it means "flat globe" for us - or otherwise we should do some mental effort to forget about "globe" and only leave the original meaning as "ground". Suppose we did - and what next? We have "ground" but it is rather a mass than an object/circumstance - whether a globe or a disk, square, cube etc.
     
    nizzebro said:
    So whatever people used to say long ago (people, not individual speculators) it just cannot be about "Earth" in our notions.
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    Cannot. Fabulous. And what grounds do you have for such generalizations?
    You know, nevermind, it doesn't even matter. This thread is drifting way too far away from the topic.
     
    Awwal12 said:
    Cannot. Fabulous. And what grounds do you have for such generalizations?
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    Because in order to refer to the Earth as a circumstance, they would have been destined to end up with astronomy, where it is a globe.

    Look: we know that the "flat Earth theory" is a fake thing (or a sort of funny trolling), just because it is not consistent in itself: it just takes something from the physics and perverts it. It has no idea and no purpose except "We will now show you that they are lying".
    Now, suppose that people before used to think that we live on a disk or, a squaure plate - exactly in the sense as we unbderstand it: a plate and some "outer space" around. A question: what could it mean - and, what is the purpose of such a weird conception?

    Just re-read the last para of my prev.post, because you seem not grasping it. There is the old notion of a layer, "world/reality", and, both the notion of a globe and its perverted disk version from the flateartheners, are options of a "materialistic" viewpoint - i.e. they do not touch other realities. In such a case it is not, say, a myth, but just a modern kind of science ("modern" may be a thousand years ago; however, speaking of China, I do not trust to anything written by Western or Russian, authors, just because they usually reinterpret everything in their own conceptions).
     
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    nizzebro said:
    Because in order to refer to the Earth as a circumstance, they would have been destined to end up with astronomy
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    There is no strict logical causation in this statement. You don't need astronomy to create imaginary models.
    nizzebro said:
    A question: what could it mean - and, what is the purpose of such a weird conception?
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    It's the simplest and most intuitive description of Earth, which summarizes its observable properties and answers several questions related to it. You don't have kids, do you? They might give you a major insight into how a human mind generally works.
     
    Awwal12 said:
    There is no strict logical causation in this statement. You don't need astronomy to create imaginary models.
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    Okay, let's replace "astronomy" with "a spatial model". And,
    Awwal12 said:
    . You don't have kids, do you? They might give you a major insight into how a human mind generally works.
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    Have your kids ever come to you and said "We think that we live on a disk?"

    Anyway my point was the purpose of the disk conception, not only the probability that someone would say something like that or think in that direction. Let's just fantasize (like kids do). What would be this model like? Just the disk? What's there around, and why? You see, we do not want just a funny decorative "sculpture", but either some kind of physics, or, some kind of myth (and myths are also not just arbitrary combinations of any absurd).
     
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    You basically need the disk to explain what exactly the sky is resting upon, as the desire to interprete the sky as a solid surface is too apparent and quite common cross-culturally.
     
    Awwal12 said:
    as the desire to interprete the sky as a solid surface is too apparent and quite common cross-culturally.
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    I never heard anything like that. Moving across something doesn't mean that it is solid in the same sense as the ground is. However, I won't ask you for citations, because I don't want to operate with the so called historical evidences - my confidence in the written history faded away completely when I knew that Herodotus the father of history exists only in a book written by some later author. About Nganasan's myths I know from people who worked with them. And in any case, the point is, again, not what "has really been in use" but what is consistent and understandable as a system in itself.

    And, even if we assume the solid state of the sky, why would I need to explain that, and, why a disk is a better thing to rest on, as compared to just an infinite plane? (I hope you wouldn't write smth like "infinte was too abstract for them").
     
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    Awwal12 said:
    It doesn't, but to examine the existing views you may start from reading the Bible.
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    I consider the Bible a very modern book - not in the sense of the date but in the sense of the era - that of Greece and Rome. These societies passed through the modernization way earlier then the mentioned indiginious minorities.

    The trick is - as now I can see it myself - that the idea of disk actually might have been in use, but, it was rather not a disk but a dome, and, it could have appeared only relatively lately, at the junction when the old culture based on extended perception was in decline, and the new rationalistic culture was about to come. The authors of this concept of dome were unable to say goodbye to Kansas in the way shamans used to, however on a purely speculative level, they at least continiued accepting the upper and lower worlds (as actually, there was a sequence of them in both directions), but, since their mindset was already of the modern, materialistic kind, it was destined to speculate in terms of geometry and about what should be there at the edges, where the sky and the ground come close visually.

    For the sake of analogy, let's imagine a kind of reversed course. Let's assume that quantum science today opens the way to many dimensions. They travel there, witness other worlds and aliens, but due to the peculiarities of the transition they cannot take any artefacts back with. However, science has a high status, and people believe (just like with shamans, isn't it?). But then comes a terrible crisis in the economy, with civil wars in developed countries and some kind of neo/pseudo-communists coming to power who kill the upper class and everyone with diplomas and degrees. Only those people remain for whom "dimension" is at best something like "where I measured", and they are convinced that all those quantum travels were fairy tales - but, they are not ready yet to restore even classical physics in its entirety. It is exactly that stage of "domes".
     
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    Moderator's note:

    As Awwal said, This discussion has gone way off-topic.
    This thread is for providing a valid translation in as many languages as possible. Any other discussion is to be carried out via PMs.
     
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