Onomasiology

I learned a new word today, 

a branch of linguistics concerned with the question "how do you express X?". ...as a part of lexicology, departs from a concept (i.e. an idea, an object, a quality, an activity etc.) and asks for its names. The opposite approach is known as semasiology: here one departs from a word and asks what it means, or what concepts the word refers to.  

It seems to be a field relevant to the distinctions in lexical field.

English	Cebuano	Tagalog
Seed	Lisu	Butó
Bone (Tetrapod)	Bukóg	Butó
Bone (Fish)	Bukóg	Tiník
Thorn	Tunók	Tiník

I should gather data for these concepts from several Central Philippine languages, and see what it tells me about shared derived characters.

"The coinage of a new designation can be incited by various forces (cf. Grzega 2004):

• difficulties in classifying the thing to be named or attributing the right word to the thing to be named, thus confusing designations
• fuzzy difference between superordinate and subordinate term due to the monopoly of the prototypical member of a category in the real world
• everyday contact situations
• institutionalized and non-institutionalized linguistic pre- and proscriptivism
• flattery
• insult
• disguising things (i.e. euphemistic language, doublespeak)
• taboo
• avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words
• abolition of forms that can be ambiguous in many contexts
• word play/punning
• excessive length of words
• morphological misinterpretation (creation of transparency by changes within a word = folk-etymology)
• deletion of irregularity
• desire for plastic/illustrative/telling names for a thing
• natural prominence of a concept
• cultural-induced prominence of a concept
• changes in the world
• changes in the categorization of the world
• prestige/fashion (based on the prestige of another language or variety, of certain word-formation patterns, or of certain semasiological centers of expansion)

The following alleged motives found in many works have shown to be invalid by Grzega (2004): decrease in salience, reading errors, laziness, excessive phonetic shortness, difficult sound combinations, unclear stress patterns, cacophony."

  - Onomasiology, Wikipedia, citing:

Grzega, Joachim (2004), Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie. Heidelberg: Winter, ISBN 3-8253-5016-9. (reviewed by Bernhard Kelle in Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik vol. 73.1 (2006), p. 92-95)