Pre-1600s, people didn't know that air was a thing/existed?

[buddha_david]

Previous thread on the subject. I’m particuarly intrigued by post #16 (emphasis mine):

@Johanna

I once made a survey of basic vocabulary (my version of the Swadesh list) from about 200 languages around the world. I included the words for fire, water, air, and earth. At least I assumed that air would be a basic word. Actually, the Swadesh list includes fire, water, and earth-- but not air.

My survey found that a great many languages had no word for air per se. Often the nearest equivalents were the words for either wind or breath.

Of the languages that did have a word for air, many of them had it as a loanword from one of four languages which provided the philosophical and learned vocabulary for their respective civilizations: Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese.

Thus English & French air, Irish aer, Italian aria, Albanian erë < Latin aer < Greek aer.
Persian/Tatar/Turkish/Urdu hava, Uzbek havo, Javanese howo < Arabic hawa’.
Sinhalese vayuva < Sanskrit vayu; Assamese batah, Bengali batash < Sanskrit vata; Khmer akas, Lao & Thai akat < Sanskrit akasa.
Korean konggi, Japanese kuki, Vietnamese không khí < Chinese kongqi.

These data suggest to me that “air” is a more abstract concept than concrete wind or breath, because it so often occurs as a loanword from the languages of the major philosophical traditions. Therefore it isn’t something immediately perceptible to the mind the way fire, water, and earth are.