Morris Swadesh was born on January 22, 1909 in Holyoke, Massachusetts and died on July 20, 1967 in Mexico City, Mexico. He was a linguist who worked with Edward Sapir. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and studied German and French. He did graduate and postgraduate work at Yale University and studied Nootka, which is an indigenous Canadian language.
He collected data on over 20 native languages in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. While in Mexico, he invented programs for people to attain literacy in their indigenous languages.
During World War II, Swadesh edited dictionaries, analyzed foreign languages, and developed materials for teaching for Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Burmese.
A major accomplishment in his life was the creation of the Swadesh List. Swadesh felt that it was necessary to create a basic vocabulary to look for cognates. Some words in his list are skin, blood, drink, water, sky, bird, smoke, long, red and cold. The list had 100 words that field workers could use for identifying the basic vocabulary of the language they were studying. His list was controversial throughout the linguistics field because linguists felt that it was not possible to make universal meanings. Still, many people use his list all the time. It is a list of common words in multiple languages the words can be used for basic communication between languages.
Also, Swadesh analyzed the sound structure of languages. He was the first to develop principles to help phonologists discover phonemes by the distribution of sounds in a given language. A good example of this is in English. Pit, Upper, and spill all have the “p” sound different. The pronunciation is dependent on the placement of the “p” in the word and Swadesh said that the sound variants should be regarded as the same sound type.
Swadesh developed a technique called lexico-statistics as well as glottochronology. He was accused of using and introducing lexico-statistics as a shortcut for investigating languages. He repeatedly stated that it is crucial to have detailed investigation.
Morris Swadesh believed that language will decay 14% over the next 1,000 years and thus we have retained only 70%-86% of language. This is also somewhat controversial because it is basically stating that all languages developed from one common language.
References:
“Morris Swadesh: Critical Essay” article is scheduled to be published in 2004 in the Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2000) http://strazny.com/writing/swadesh/ (3/2/04)
“Morris Swadesh” Encyclopedia4u.com(2004) http://www.encyclopedia4u.com/m/morris-swadesh.html (3/2/04)
“Swadesh List” Wiktionary.org(11/2/03) http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Swadesh_list (3/2/04)
Written by: Chris Bova 3/2/04