𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem is a scientific project meant to explore the “Evolving Semantics” at play in the world's languages. It brings in one place the vast knowledge acquired by generations of scholars in the domain of etymology, for a variety of language families. Our purpose is to observe empirically the way languages have built semantic connections between concepts, through the historical evolution of their lexicons.
As of November 2023, 𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem features a total of 31,143 concepts, expressed by 169,256 words from 1941 languages, as well as 18,527 etyma from 115 proto-languages.
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𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem builds around the notion of dialexification. It combines graphs with tables, to display the historical relations between concepts, across the world's families.
→ Read our online manual. -
𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem visualizes the internal semantic diversity of each cognate set in the form of “𝓔tymographs”.
→ Explore our 𝓔tymographs. -
𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem analyzes the proximity, synchronic and diachronic, that language families establish among concepts.
→ Search our list of 𝓔𝓿𝓸Concepts, and access key statistics on how they are dialexified. -
𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem is being developed by a team of researchers and programmers based at CNRS—LaTTiCe (Paris)
→ Meet our team.
Here is how you can cite the 𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem database:
Alexandre François, Siva Kalyan, Mathieu Dehouck, Martial Pastor & David Kletz. () 𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem: A database of dialexification across language families. Online database. CNRS—LaTTiCe, Paris. https://tiny.cc/EvoSem [access date: ]
If you wish to know more about 𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem — why and how it was created, or how to read its graphs and tables — you can read our paper:
Mathieu Dehouck, Alexandre François, Siva Kalyan, Martial Pastor & David Kletz. (2023)𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem: A database of polysemous cognate sets. In Nina Tahmasebi et al. (conv.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 66–75. Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
