Eclipse expressions in East and Southeast Asia: Typology, geolinguistics, and areal lexical semantics

Languages of East and Southeast Asia share a range of areal features, but lexical semantics has received far less attention than phonology and morphosyntax. This paper examines expressions for solar and lunar eclipses in more than 400 linguistic varieties from lexico-semantic, typological, and geolinguistic perspectives. It reveals a widespread tendency to conceptualize eclipses as acts of consumption, with the sun or moon as the patient of an ingestive event involving an animal, spirit, celestial being, or mythological creature. Although the identity of the consumer varies considerably across languages, frogs, dogs, and celestial dogs are especially common, and the same basic semantic structure recurs across multiple language families. The most frequent ingestive verbs are ‘eat’ and ‘swallow’. Other conceptualizations, including seizure, suffering, and death, are also attested. Consumption-based expressions form a broad and largely continuous geographical zone across East and Southeast Asia, suggesting that they constitute an areal pattern in lexical semantics shaped by long-term cultural and linguistic contact. These findings shed light on semantic diffusion in the region and show how eclipse expressions can contribute to the study of the relationships among language, folklore, and areal history.