| Morris Swadesh |
Article Index for Morris |
Website Links For Morris |
Information AboutMorris Swadesh |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MORRIS SWADESH | |
| 1909 births | |
| 1967 deaths | |
| american linguists | |
|
studied with Edward Sapir . During the 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 the harassment of leftists 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 Lexicostatics , which attempts to classify languages on the basis of the extent to which they have replaced basic words reconstructible to the proto-language, and Glottochronology , which extends lexicostatistics by computing divergence dates from the lexical retention rate. 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 are known as Swadesh List s. 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 . SEE ALSO . BIBLIOGRAPHY
EXTERNAL LINKS |
|
|