Morris Swadesh (/ˈswɒdɛʃ/; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics.
Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933. Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services. He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership in the Communist Party. He spent most of the rest of his life teaching in Mexico and Canada.
Swadesh had a particular interest in the indigenous languages of the Americas, and conducted extensive fieldwork throughout North America. He was one of the pioneers of glottochronology and lexicostatistics, and is known for his creation of the Swadesh list, a compilation of basic concepts believed to present across cultures and thus suitable for cross-linguistic comparison. Swadesh believed that his techniques could discover deep relationships between apparently unrelated languages, thus allowing for the identification of macrofamilies and possibly even a "Proto-Human" language. His theories were often controversial, and some have been deprecated by later linguists.
MorrisSwadesh (/ˈswɒdɛʃ/; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh...
quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist MorrisSwadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative...
chronological relationship between languages.: 131 The idea was developed by MorrisSwadesh in the 1950s in his article on Salish internal relationships. He developed...
20th-century work (mostly unpublished) of linguists MorrisSwadesh and John R. Swanton. Swadesh in particular wrote a full grammar and dictionary, and...
language since the 1990s. They use notes and recordings made by linguist MorrisSwadesh around 1930. They have also started immersion classes for children and...
Look up Swadesh in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Swadesh is a given name and surname. Notable people with the name include: MorrisSwadesh (1909–1967)...
anthropology at Yale. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and MorrisSwadesh, and anthropologists such as Fred Eggan and Hortense Powdermaker. With...
Slavic languages. The word list is based on the Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist MorrisSwadesh, a tool to study the evolution of languages via...
Anthropological Linguistics. 39 (4): 544–549. JSTOR 30028485. Swadesh, Mary Haas; Swadesh, Morris (1933). "A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text (With...
proposed by Edward Sapir and Leo J. Frachtenberg, and later elaborated by MorrisSwadesh, the Wakashan languages were grouped together with Salishan and Chimakuan...
glottochronology linguistic model of MorrisSwadesh, future languages should retain just 1 out of 100 "core vocabulary" words on their Swadesh list compared to that...
with little acceptance from linguists. Earlier American linguists like MorrisSwadesh and Edward Sapir also pursued large-scale classifications like Sapir's...
glottalized sounds. While early linguists such as André Martinet and MorrisSwadesh had seen the potential of substituting glottalic sounds for the supposed...
further information, read the article: Swadesh list The Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist MorrisSwadesh, is used as a tool to study the evolution...
studies by Sapir, Collinson, and MorrisSwadesh in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, were funded by IALA. Alice Morris edited several of these studies...
Norton & Company, Inc. p. 166. ISBN 0-393-32211-4. Sapir, Edward and MorrisSwadesh (1939). Nootka texts: tales and ethnological narratives, with grammatical...
functional speaker (her mother was Miluk), and was an informant to MorrisSwadesh for his Penutian Vocabulary Survey. The consonant inventory of Miluk...
the trees produced by both methods. Lexicostatistics was developed by MorrisSwadesh in a series of articles in the 1950s, based on earlier ideas. The concept's...
diverged from the Proto-Mayan language between 2200 and 1200 BCE. Linguist MorrisSwadesh posited the later date as the latest possible time for this split to...
with MorrisSwadesh but is based on earlier work. This uses a short word list of basic vocabulary in the various languages for comparisons. Swadesh used...
component of discovery procedure is likely first to have been done by MorrisSwadesh in 1934 and then applied to principles of phonematics, to establish...
reconstructions by Campbell and Oltrogge (1980): Greenberg, Joseph Harold, and MorrisSwadesh. 1953 Jicaque as a Hokan Language. IJAL 19:3 Dixon, R. B., and Alfred...
(Hívaro-Kawapánan) (Jorge Suárez and others) or Macro-Jibaro or Macro-Andean (MorrisSwadesh and others, with Cahuapanan, Urarina, Puelche, and maybe Huarpe). The...
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