Morris Swadesh
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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 he studied 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 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 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.
[edit] Bibliography
- Newman, Stanley. (1967). Morris Swadesh (1909-1967), Language, 43.
- Price, David H. (1997). Anthropologists on Trial. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November 1997. http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/AAA97.htm
- Price, David (2004) Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3326-0
- Swadesh, Morris. (1950). Salish internal relationships. International Journal of American Linguistics, 16, 157-167.
- Swadesh, Morris. (1952). Lexicostatistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts. Proceedings American Philosophical Society, 96, 452-463.
- Swadesh, Morris. (1955). Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21, 121-137.
[edit] External links
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Swadesh, Morris |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American linguist; researched historical linguistics and Native American languages |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 22, 1909 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Holyoke, Massachusetts, United States |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 20, 1967 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Mexico City, Mexico |
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