Your mention of Lexicon reminded me of another "shelf Project".
Words have always fascinated me, one thing I've noticed is that we don't actually read words. The word contains the phonetic elements so that you can build it, but you don't actually phonetically read it, unless it is a word you don't understand. You actually see the word, sort of like a picture. I thought why not have pictures, a pictorial language, a universal language an "iconic language" ...
I search the internet and I found a couple of books on the subject along with some sparse free stuff.
And this:-
Iconic Communication
by Yazdani, Masoud
The problem with an iconic language is that one picture will mean one thing to one person and an mean something completely different to another. For example in England, dog = pet, in Thailand dog = food...
So an iconic language based on pictures was out of the question. Hold on though is it? Well actually, No it's not, not with a mobile phone App. With an app, you can show the user if they are English, a dog meaning dog and if they are Thai, a dog meaning food...
I also worked out a very clever (I thought) interface, based on text messaging. Text messaging was the initial thing that pointed me in the direction of an iconic language. I remember when phones were first given the text messaging ability, my wife and other female members of the family spend an inordinate amount of time communicating by text messages. They also developed a technique of creating words to limit the number of characters they had to press. I realised how important it was, particularly for women to be able to communicate in this way. I don't know why, but there's something fundamental about it that is attractive to women.
I realised that an iconic language would put "Texting" in the hands of women who couldn't read. The Number of women who can't read, make up quite a large proportion of the third world. I also realised that eventually our technology, our discarded mobile phones will percolate through the stratus of humanity to the poorest.
I was in an auction room just outside London, talking to Robert, a Kenyan chap buying laptops to take back to Kenya for sale. I explain to him my idea of the Iconic language and he was intrigued. You see the other thing about an Iconic language is it allows people with different languages to talk to each other. What I got from Robert ways that
Kenya is riddled with multiple languages, and what I didn't know, the language you speak dictates the class (Caste?) you are in. If you can acquire a new language, a higher Caste language, then you can move up into that Caste. It was just the language which was the barrier.
I realised there would also be an exceptional motivation for certain people to learn to read. Another aspect to the Iconic language, is you could pop up the actual word associated with the icon and start teaching people how to read.
Now there are in the region of 7000 languages in the World, so there's no way I can create this and set up all the languages and everything, it would just be impossible. However go back to what I said about the ladies adapting the SMS messaging system to their needs, creating their own language their own words! I realised that if the mechanism could be set up, and remembering something Jon said, a minimum viable system. Provide a minimum viable system and I think the women would build the rest for you.
Now don't get me wrong, there are loads and loads and loads and loads of problems! One of the main problems is how to convey action words? Well I thought about this and I wondered about little moving gifs demonstrating the action. I have found software on the internet where it's very easy to draw little sets of pictures and turn them into an animation. You could also video somebody doing something, and turn it into a tiny moving icon.
You might ask WHY? You might ask where's the money? I don't know WHY! - except that I just feel instinctively that it will work and is needed. I have no idea other than that. What I would say is that so far, every obstacle that has presented itself Has fallen away, once I applied a little effort to solving the problem. And of the remaining problems I see, I don't see anything that doesn't have a solution. Now; there are obviously problems I have yet to discover! Now; whether these will fall away or not, remains to be seen!
As for the money, one feature of my interface is that it stores the order the icons are presented in, in other words it records how people communicate. For example in England we say "the green dress" and in Spain they might say "the dress green" - in other words the technology extracts useful information about language. Now you might say that the technology is already there to take your speech and turn it into text.
However there are only a very few languages that is available for. And like I said there are over 7000 languages! So I think the system has an intrinsic value in the way it collects data. And another aspect of speech, speech can be overheard, texting can be done in secret, think of the dis-empowered women of the world. A secret communication system based on an iconic language, in other words they don't need to be able to read. Think of the power it would it give them!
Anyway my stumbling block at the moment as I need "Lexicons" I need sets of images along with what they represent, in English a single word hopefully! So if you see anything like that I would be very interested!
There's also a contrary view on iconic languages here is one example:-
The Ideographic Myth 
