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The 22 categories of words used in Carl Darling Buck's "A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages" (1949) are quite different from for instance the categories in Roget's thesaurus as of 1911. There is no background in the book itself on how the 22 categories where chosen. Did Buck make the list himself or was he following some (undocumented?) tradition?

Buck's categories are used in at least two other projects, IDS and WOLD, which attribute the categories to Buck. It is a little odd that the history of this categorization-scheme seems to be missing.

kaleissin
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    They could easily have started with Buck. Where did Roget's categories come from? – Mitch Oct 03 '11 at 13:32
  • Books have been written about how Roget struggled with those categories, so I consider those to be documented. I want something like that for the Buck-categories though preferably not pop-sci. – kaleissin Oct 03 '11 at 13:38
  • I've updated the links. It seems a lot of linguistic databases are moving to CLLD these days. – kaleissin Nov 17 '18 at 15:03

1 Answers1

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I haven't read his Introduction for a while, but that's where I'd start. If he doesn't deal with it there, I can't help you,

however, you should be aware

  • that these are all pretty standard categories in natural meaning categorizations, like PIE roots, Levin's verb lists, classifier systems, phonosemantics, etc.

and

  • that no linguist I know is very concerned about where Buck got his 22 categories. 22 is not an unreasonable number: if it works, use it; if it doesn't, ignore it. Certainly one can use more or fewer categories; there's nothing sacred about 22 the way there is about, say, 42.
jlawler
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