Robin & Roger:
<snip>
This sounds a bit like the Historical Thesaurus of English
<snip>
Yes, to the extent that there are sets and subsets made up of concepts and
further subsets made up of individual lexemes. However, the classification
seems to me factitious rather than principled and therefore A Bad Thing. Or
at least Not Quite What I Meant.
Theoretically, in the grand unified lexicon of how we look at the world, I
speak of none but the database that comes after, there will be a finite set
of conceptual primitives derived presumably from the sensorium (maybe
temperature, direction, colour, amplitude, sidedness and so forth) from
which may be derived in turn both all possible subsets and their
intersections. Fat chance, I suspect. But I suppose it's the thought that
counts.
<snip>
I know you can do the searchable on the OED2. However, the interface is
closed.
<snip>
Yes, you can search in all sorts of ways: morpheme, date of first
occurrence, locution, co-occurrence, author and so forth. By strategic use
of asterisks you can pick up not only 'sort out' but also 'sorts..',
'sorting...' and 'sorted out'. But what you can't do is a search that will
bring up, say, 'warm [hearted]', 'hot [under the colour]' and '[a] roasting'
as aspects of the same conceptual phenomenon, though that is probably what
they are.
I don't think that's a consequence of any restriction upon access. Rather
it's because the ideology of the dictionary, instantiated in how the
database is constructed, does not allow for that sort of thing.
CW
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That which is the future here, when read from right to left, has
already happened. (Giorgio Manganelli)
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