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:
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.
“It is true that the reality is often continuous (as Democritus famously noted)”
Eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomism
Heraclitus, maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Unity_of_opposites_and_flux
The website is certainly a good idea in principle. Haspelmath kinda putting his money where his mouth is.
Hiphilangsci has a podcast with him which is well worth listening to BTW:
https://hiphilangsci.net/2025/11/01/podcast-episode-51/
(I see that the most recent one is actually with Anna Wierzbicka, but I haven’t heard it yet.)
(I have to say that I’m with Heraclitus rather than Democritus when it comes to alleged linguistic primitives, though: πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.)