Semantic Domains

[Kuchigakatai]

Today I was conlanging a bit when I remembered Ares Land's recent post on the importance of conworlding and the lexicon to succeed at getting further. It occurred to me that semantic domains would be very useful for lexical expansion, and I was happy to see I was able to find some nice free resources.

Semantic Domains (semdom.org)
- By: SIL International, originally written and edited by: Moe, Ronald
- URL: https://semdom.org/
- Description: A website made using data from SIL's project of a resource containing semantic domains, which its missionary-fieldworkers would use to elicit words with less difficulty, originally intended for Bantu languages interestingly enough.
- Access: On a large screen, hover the "Semantic Domains" tab, and you will see the nine main macrodomains ("Universe", "Person", "Language"...). On a phone, open the menu and you'll see them there. Each domain's main page has a "Printer-friendly Version" link that shows you a bare no-frills HTML page, which you can print from your browser, including print into a PDF. On Chrome and Firefox, on both Windows and Linux, you can press Ctrl+P to get the Print dialogue (or alternatively, press Alt to display the hidden menu; seriously, why is that hidden?), and then "Print to File" should be one of the options among the "printers". The first domain alone ("Universe, Creation") prints into a 59-page PDF, 223 KiB big. The nine PDFs are 2.7 MiB in total.
- Extra note: the "Printer-friendly version" and "PDF version" links in the Description/Development/Usage pages only download a version of those small pages, so they're not what you want. Instead, go to the nine top-level domains, and download or print them one by one (it'll be only nine downloads/prints).

Semantic Domains: for vocabulary of Australian languages
- By: Australian National University
- Date: "Last modified 11 January 2017"
- URL: https://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash ... mains.html
- Description: Five very short semantic domain lists, if the previous entry seems too daunting... Interestingly, the last one is a suggested list of domains for picture dictionaries.
- Access: it's a simple HTML page.

Indo-European Semantic Fields
- By: Linguistics Research Center, at The University of Texas at Austin
- Date: unknown, this page from University of Hawaii gives a terminus ante quem of 2013
- URL: https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/semantic
- Description: A simplification of Carl Buck's widely-used inventory of semantic domains in his A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (1949), apparently with some domains taken out, and simplified to only two tiers. It is an incomplete work in terms of the stated goal of classifying the Pokorny's etyma, but the categories alone are useful.
- Access: there's a list of 22 related pages there, each with a short list.

Semantic Fields for IDS and LWTML
- By: for IDS, Key, Mary Ritchie; Comrie, Bernard; for WOLD, Haspelmath, Martin; Tadmor, Uri
- Date: 2008, as described in WOLD's landing page
- URL: https://ids.clld.org/parameters (IDS) or https://wold.clld.org/meaning (WOLD)
- Description: another simplification of Carl Buck's inventory mentioned above, used by these typologists for the Intercontinental Dictionary Series and World Loanword Database projects. 1460 domains are listed, classified in the same 22 broad categories as in the previous entry, in two levels.
- Access: there is a small pair of buttons on the upper-right area, one being an "i" enclosed in a circle, and the other a down arrow ↓. Press the down-arrow button, and you'll see a number of download options. I suggest the .xls option as the easiest format, as that's just a classic Excel file (in the 1997-2003 standard format, perfectly handled in today's Excel and LibreOffice Calc). The .xls file is a mere 160 KiB.

A Thematic Dictionary of Verdurian
- By: zompist
- Date: unknown, likely quite old (<1997). A "third edition" was dated 1997 already, as can be seen in a snapshot from August 2000 on web.archive.org.
- URL: https://www.zompist.com/thematic.htm
- Description: last and humbly also least, zomp's thematic Verdurian lexicon.
- Access: it's a simple HTML page.


I think the above can be used for either outright working on the lexicon, or for working out aspects of cultures as related to some particular domain.

[bradrn]

Um… possibly a stupid question, but what exactly is a ‘semantic domain’?

(That said, I’m always interested in wordlists like these, so thanks for the links! I’m sure I’ll get lots of use out of them.)

[Kuchigakatai]

Um… possibly a stupid question, but what exactly is a ‘semantic domain’?

As the SIL page says:

A semantic domain is an area of meaning and the words used to talk about it. A domain is often given a name consisting of a common word in the domain. For instance English has a domain ‘Rain’, which includes words such as rain, drizzle, downpour, raindrop, puddle. We use these words to talk about the rain.

SIL made that website to facilitate elicitation while working with native speakers, but a conlanger could use them to think about areas of a conlang. You could also do some wordbuilding as you try to work out whether a distinction is important to the conlang speakers (as opposed to optional), and what particular concepts or items they have.

[bradrn]

Um… possibly a stupid question, but what exactly is a ‘semantic domain’?

As the SIL page says:

A semantic domain is an area of meaning and the words used to talk about it. A domain is often given a name consisting of a common word in the domain. For instance English has a domain ‘Rain’, which includes words such as rain, drizzle, downpour, raindrop, puddle. We use these words to talk about the rain.

SIL made that website to facilitate elicitation while working with native speakers, but a conlanger could use them to think about areas of a conlang. You could also do some wordbuilding as you try to work out whether a distinction is important to the conlang speakers (as opposed to optional), and what particular concepts or items they have.

Thank you, that helps a lot! (And, given that I don’t even have a map yet, some worldbuilding is surely in order )