The Solar–Iron & Fire–Nation/Castle Convergence Hypothesis in Northeast Asian Onomastics

This study proposes that early Northeast Asian solar symbolism predates metallurgy, and that with the introduction of iron technology, the same phonological clusters used to denote the sun were reapplied to iron and related authority. This convergence produced overlapping lexical domains across place names, ethnonyms, and divine titles. Dental and alveolar consonants emerge as dominant in both semantic fields, reflecting a shared cognitive metaphor of piercing, heat, and power.