From Lexicon to Cosmology: A Review of Linguistic Dimensions in Cultural Astronomy

Abstract

Cultural astronomy, the study of human relationships with the sky has long been dominated by archaeology and the history of astronomy, while its linguistic dimensions remain systematically undertheorized. This narrative review critically examines representative literature from 2005 to 2026 across four thematic domains: star-name semantics, grammatical encoding of celestial knowledge, linguistic relativity in time concepts, and transmission mechanisms of Indigenous astronomical knowledge. The review finds that celestial naming exhibits stable embodied cognitive patterns across languages, yet borrowing and semantic change pathways are more complex than existing models suggest, as demonstrated by Ge'ez planetary nomenclature and Mesopotamian-Greek star-name transmission. Grammatical encoding—noun classification, numeral classifiers, evidential marking, and absolute spatial frames—reveals language as an active structuring mechanism for astronomical cognition rather than a passive mirror, with Tariana evidentiality and Guugu Yimithirr solar-anchored coordinates providing particularly strong evidence. The Amondawa and Aymara cases both challenge and refine the linguistic relativity hypothesis, while their methodological limitations warrant equal scrutiny. Oral genres, Wardaman songlines, Polynesian wayfinding chants, and Rapa Nui material anchors—function as differentiated cognitive storage technologies whose poetic features serve knowledge preservation rather than decoration. The review identifies three systematic limitations in existing scholarship: corpus imbalance favoring written traditions, insufficient interdisciplinary dialogue between linguists and cultural astronomers, and methodological fragility of "absence" judgments. To address these, the paper proposes "celestial semantic domain" as an integrative analytical framework comprising lexical, grammatical, and discourse-genre levels, and argues that cultural astronomy should become a regular domain of semantic typology and language documentation rather than a marginal curiosity. Future priorities include cross-linguistic celestial vocabulary databases, integration of celestial semantics into fieldwork protocols, experimental research on evidentiality and causal reasoning, and cognitive-linguistic models of oral astronomical genres.