Everything about Morris Swadesh totally explained
Morris Swadesh (
January 22,
1909 -
July 20,
1967) was an
American linguist. He was born in
Holyoke, Massachusetts to Russian Jewish parents from whom he learned
Yiddish. He received his B.A. from the
University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from
Yale University, where hestudied with
Edward Sapir. During the Second World War he worked on military projects to compile reference materials for
Burmese,
Chinese,
Russian, and
Spanish. In May of 1949 Swadesh was fired by the
City College of New York as the result of accusations that he was a
Communist, making him one of a number of
anthropologists to fall victim to harassment by anti-Communists during the
McCarthy Era. He continued to work in the
United States with limited funding from the
American Philosophical Society until 1954 when he took a position as Professor at the
National School of Anthropology and History in
Mexico City, where he remained until his death.
Swadesh is best known for his bold but arguably flawed work in
historical linguistics. He proposed a number of distant genetic links among languages that are not generally regarded as valid today. He was also one of the pioneers of
lexicostatistics, which attempts to classify languages on the basis of the extent to which they've replaced basic words reconstructible to the proto-language, and
glottochronology, which extends lexicostatistics by computing divergence dates from the lexical retention rate.
He became a consultant with the
International Auxiliary Language Association, which standardized
Interlingua and presented it to the public in 1951. In this role, he originated the lists of 100 and 200 basic vocabulary items used (with some variation) in lexicostatistics and
glottochronology, as a result of which they're known as
Swadesh lists.
Swadesh also conducted extensive fieldwork on
native American languages, most
prominently the
Chitimacha language in the 1930's. His fieldnotes and subsequent publications now constitute our main source of information on this now-extinct
language isolate.
Swadesh was married for a time to linguist
Mary Haas. He died in
Mexico City in July 1967.
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