# When did people discover air?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-people-discover-air/467258>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 10, 2008, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-people-discover-air/467258 "2008-10-10T00:31:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 16

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\
**Post date:** [October 11, 2008, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-people-discover-air/467258/16 "2008-10-11T02:37:57Z")

</div>

I once made a survey of basic vocabulary (my version of the [Swadesh list](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-people-discover-air/467258)._