What proportion of linguists with an interest in semantics regard "semantic primes" as a useful concept? The Wikipedia articles don't seem to have a "Criticism" section, which isn't a good sign.
It looks interesting, certainly, but rather arbitrary. There are several pairs of opposites, which in a minimal language could be handled with the concept of "opposite", and I have no idea how you'd express some fundamental concepts of human experience such as hunger, cold, pain or surprise, while "live, die" do not seem to me to be such fundamental concepts: they seem more like concepts that need to be defined, for example by a philosopher or medical specialist, rather than experienced directly.
It looks interesting, certainly, but rather arbitrary. There are several pairs of opposites, which in a minimal language could be handled with the concept of "opposite", and I have no idea how you'd express some fundamental concepts of human experience such as hunger, cold, pain or surprise, while "live, die" do not seem to me to be such fundamental concepts: they seem more like concepts that need to be defined, for example by a philosopher or medical specialist, rather than experienced directly.