The Grammaticon.

Martin Haspelmath has been working on a project he’s now put online:

The Grammaticon: Linking grammatical comparative concepts to typological databases

This blogpost introduces a new resource for general-comparative linguistics: the Grammaticon, a collection of hundreds of grammatical comparative concept terms (Haspelmath & Englisch 2026). Version 1.0 has just gone online:

https://grammaticon.clld.org/

Many of these terms are linked to typological features represented in database collections such as WALS, Grambank, or APiCS. Grammatical terminology is quite variable (and often somewhat confusing), so the Grammaticon offers some guidance: Each term has a standard definition, and definitions are typically linked to other terminological resources (such as Wikipedia), and for many of the typological features, the Grammaticon explains how their technical terms relate to the definitions in the Grammaticon.

The Grammaticon was first conceived of in 2017, and the idea was presented at the ALT conference in Canberra (Haspelmath & Forkel 2017). Version 1.0 is now public, and it is hoped that it will be extended and improved greatly over the coming months and years.

Click through for the FAQs; a sample:

The Grammaticon definitions use ordinary language (no abbreviations or other notational devices) and recognize that some terms cannot be defined – they are treated as “primitives”. Is it an accident that this approach is similar to Anna Wierzbicka‘s NSM approach (Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wierzbicka 1996)?

It is not an accident – the Grammaticon has been inspired by Igor Mel‘čuk‘s approach to definitions of linguistic terms (e.g. Mel‘čuk 1982), and Mel‘čuk in turn inspired Wierzbicka in the 1960s. For the meanings of ordinary words, Wierzbicka‘s approach is compelling and almost without rivals, and it seems to me that technical terms of grammar are best treated in a similar way.