Spirit = Breath

[Xephyr]

Just how widespread in languages/cultures is it to associate spirit or life force with breath or wind? The only example I know of off-hand outside of the Semitic and Indo-European languages is Xhosa umoya "wind; spirit", but for all I know that could've been adopted from the Dutch. Anyone know of languages that use some other metaphor for "spirit"?

[gach]

Henki = "breath; life; spirit; mood"

[Salmoneus]

One counterexample is English 'soul', of unknown origin but no apparent link to breathing. An interesting one is English 'ghost', which appears to originate in a word for anger, the develop a sense as spirit, and only later develop another sense as 'breath', which it then lost.
[Spirit, animus, pneuma and psyche all comes from different breath-words. Heart, mind, and life, however, are independent in origin]

I think élan is a counterexample?

Not to be snarky, though, I think a problem here will be in trying to impose European philosophical traditions, and related terminology, onto other languages [eg English's own soul vs spirit distinction is largely an attempt to find vocabulary to mimic the psyche/pneuma distinction of Greek thought] What is 'life force', what is 'spirit'? I suspect that 'translations' for these terms will often end up just being the words for life, thought, heat, or motion. Or ghost, in the incorporeal being sense. Life words will often be related to breath words because breath is the most obvious sign of life; ghost words may also be related to breath words because it's common to see breezes both as breath and as the work of spirits.

[zompist]

Chinese 气 qì is etymologically 'breath' (and this is very ancient).

(Quechua for ‘soul’ is nuna, but I don't have an etymology for it. No relation to ‘breath’, samay).

[gach]

You can also see a likely semantic specialisation to the opposite direction in Finnic. There's an ancient word for "soul" that you can find across Finno-Ugrian (such as Komi lov, Hungarian lélek) and is reconstructible to PFU (*lewli; Sammallahti). In Komi this specifically refers to a soul that's bound to your breath and is separate from a shadow soul called ort, showing again the conceptual connection between spirit and breath. However, in Finnic the word has narrowed down to only refer to the steam you get from the stove in a sauna (Finnish löyly) and the meaning of "spirit" it might have is at most deeply archaic. Presumably this is a result of henki taking over the semantic field and leaving löyly only a single residual task.

[Vijay]

Dji, the Romani word for 'life force' (or the closest equivalent of that), apparently comes from a Sanskrit word that can mean not only 'vital breath' but also 'any living being' or 'life'. The word for the spirit of a deceased ancestor, though, is just the word for 'dead'.

[Xephyr]

Life words will often be related to breath words because breath is the most obvious sign of life; ghost words may also be related to breath words because it's common to see breezes both as breath and as the work of spirits.

One reason I ask is because I think I remember-- but am not sure-- reading that some languages use their word for "blood" rather than "breath" as the metaphor for life spirit etc. I can't remember where I saw this, though.

[Αυτοβοτα]

Life words will often be related to breath words because breath is the most obvious sign of life; ghost words may also be related to breath words because it's common to see breezes both as breath and as the work of spirits.

One reason I ask is because I think I remember-- but am not sure-- reading that some languages use their word for "blood" rather than "breath" as the metaphor for life spirit etc. I can't remember where I saw this, though.

OT, but the Western European(?) usage of blood to mean "lineage, pedigree, genetics" is instead bone in Korean, where the royals were the "sacred bone". Another example of cultural difference in quasi-(meta)physical concepts.

As far as breath/spirit goes, I like how in the Romance languages (and Esperanto! in its name!) the word for breath/spirit also came to mean "hope".