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. The concept seems to be the result of thinkers reflecting on the underlying principle that accounts for phenomena like wind, breath, and why would water fail to enter an inverted container.
There are some notable exceptions, like vozdukh in Slavic languages (probably derived from dukh ‘breath’) and luft (originally meaning ‘sky’) in Germanic languages. But the less a language is connected to literate learned traditions, the less likely it is to have a word for air separate from words for wind or breath.