Swadesh list: Difference between revisions

A Swadesh list is one of several lists of vocabulary with "basic" meanings and developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1940-50s, which is used in lexicostatistics (quantitative language relatedness assessment) and glottochronology (language divergence dating).

The Swadesh word list may be used in lexicostatistics and glottochronology to determine the approximate date of first separation of genetically related language, though other lists may be used. The closeness of the relationship of the languages is suggested to be roughly proportional to the number of cognate words present in the list. The reason that a fixed set of concepts is used, rather than a list of arbitrary words, is that the basic vocabulary learned during early childhood is assumed to change very slowly over time. Note that the task of counting the number of cognate words in the list is far from trivial, and may be subject to dispute, because cognates do not necessarily look similar, and recognition of cognates presupposes knowledge of the sound laws of the respective languages. For example, English 'wheel' and Hindi 'cakra' are cognates, although they are not recognizable as such without knowledge of the history of both languages. Also, even in cases where the number of cognates is undisputed, use of Swadesh lists for dating is disputed, because of the underlying assumption that the rate of replacement of basic vocabulary is constant over long periods of time. While Swadesh lists are a useful tool to get a rough idea, mainstream historical linguistics is usually very sceptical about claims of relatedness based on Swadesh lists exclusively.

The use of Swadesh lists in glottochronology was most popular during the 1960s and 1970s, after which enthusiasm waned and the discussion of the method's merit became emotional, leading to a temporary demise of the method. Refinements since the early 1970s include the incorporation of a geographical dimension into the equations, accounting for borrowing.

A recent example of the use of Swadesh lists for absolute dating is the study of Gray and Atkinson (2003), calculating a tree of Indo-European languages with absolute dates for its nodes, using Bayesian principles, dating the Proto-Indo-European language to ca. 7000 BC (see Indo-Hittite). The study, which begins with a merciless criticism of the earlier forms of glottochronology) is based on the set of 200-word swadesh lists compiled by Isidore Dyen for 87 indoeuropean languages. This 200-word swadesh list was already early abandoned by Swadesh for suspect with too many borrowed items, and has additionally been shown to be very unreliable (cf. Embleton 1995). (Swadesh later introduced a 100 item list which he considered more universal and culture-free. Because of this and false underlying assumptions of rates in language change, the work is generally argued against by practitioners of historical linguistics (cf. e.g. Campbell 1998:177ff).) The method of Gray and Atkinson is in fact based upon methods developed for the analysis of genetic (as in dna, chromosomes etc. not the linguistic term of genetic relationship). The new method used by Gray and Atkins derives from methods used in calculating distance in biological genetic relationships. It should be noted that their study is published in Nature, a publication more often associated with the natural sciences than with linguistics, let alone historical linguistics, and it remains to be seen if the method will achieve wide acceptance in linguistics. A potential stumbling block is that genetics while seemingly similar to language development differs in one important respect, that of generation time. A mutation must, in order to spread through the gene pool, do so through an iterative process of procreation, breeding. This means that it's progression through the gene pool can be measured and traced in generations and the generations of a species in a steady state have an average rate of some reliability. Lexical "mutation" obeys no such ordered pattern. While it is a fact that the young often use different words than their elders (now as well as in ancient Rome, as far as we know) it is also a fact that usually these same people, when they grow older, relinquish their youthful vocabulary in order to receive the fruits of seniority; power and respect. Also, language does not require iterative procreation in order to change (language change cannot exclusively follow from the incomplete learning of the language by the young, as was held in some early versions of generative grammar). Rather a new word, or a changed meaning of an old word can obviously spread from young to old, from old to young and from peer to peer, although flow from low-status to high-status is usually slower than the opposite. As such, the inherent timeability of genetic change does not hold for lexical change. Another weakness in the study is that it is attempted to provide evidence for and/or against two proposed proto-indoeuropean homelands. Various proposals for an indoeuropean homeland are so many and with such diverse time-depth that any arbitrary timespan over four thousand years ago is likely to fit very well with at least one of these theories.

Below is the Swadesh list of 207 words in the English language. For a Swadesh list that compares English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Esperanto, Swedish, and Latin (with links to other lists in other languages), see Wiktionary:Swadesh list.

• Campbell, Lyle. (1998). Historical linguistics; An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Embleton, Sheila (1995). Review of ‘An Indo-European classification: A lexicostatistical experiment’ by I. Dyen; J.B. Kruskal & P.Black. TAPS Monograph 82-5, Philadelphia. in Diachronica 12-2/1992:263-68.
• Gray, Russell D.; & Atkinson, Quentin D. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin, Nature, 426.
• Gudschinsky, Sarah. (1956). The ABC's of lexicostatistics (glottochronology). Word, 12, 175-210.
• Hoijer, Harry. (1956). Lexicostatistics: A critique. Language, 32, 49-60.
• 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.
• Swadesh, Morris (1972). What is glottochronology? In M. Swadesh, The origin and diversification of languages (pp. 271–284). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

• Lexico-semantic universals: A critical overview (.pdf, requires login)
• Rosetta project
• Swadesh Lists of Brazilian Native Languages

Look up Appendix:Swadesh list in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Swadesh lists at Wiktionary
• Basic English
• Historical linguistics
• Glottochronology
• Proto-language
• cognate
• Indo-European studies
• Mass lexical comparison