Morris Swadesh
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Morris Swadesh (January 22, 1909 - July 20, 1967) was an influential and controversial American linguist. He was known for extensive work on Chitimacha, a now-extinct language, and historical linguistics. In the post-World War II years as the Cold War heightened tensions, he was fired from City College of New York in 1949 due to accusations that he had been a Communist. Effectively blacklisted in academia, he emigrated to Mexico in 1954 to work at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City, where he lived the rest of his life.
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[edit] Early life and education
He was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, from whom he learned his first language of Yiddish[citation needed].
Swadesh received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Yale University, where he studied with the great linguist Edward Sapir.
[edit] Early career
Swadesh conducted extensive fieldwork in the 1930s on Native American languages, most prominently the Chitimacha language. His fieldnotes and subsequent publications constitute our main source of information on this now-extinct language isolate. He also conducted smaller amounts of fieldwork on the Menominee and Mahican languages.
During the Second World War he worked on military projects to compile reference materials on Burmese, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.
[edit] Political persecution
In May 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.
He then took a position as Professor at the National School of Anthropology and History (Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia [1]) in Mexico City, where he remained until his death.
[edit] Work in historical linguistics
Swadesh is best known for his bold but arguably flawed work in historical linguistics. He proposed a number of distant genetic links among languages. He was the chief pioneer 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 became a consultant with the International Auxiliary Language Association, which standardized Interlingua and presented it to the public in 1951 (Esterhill 2000). 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 are known as the Swadesh lists.
He was a supporter of monogenesis, a marginal position among American linguists in the 20th century. "Swadesh sought to show that all the world's languages are related in one large family" (Ruhlen 1994:215).
[edit] Personal life
Swadesh was married for a time to Mary Haas, a fellow linguist. He was later married to Frances Leon, with whom he worked in Mexico in the 1930s. Subsequently divorced, he married Evangelina Arana following his return to Mexico. He died in Mexico City in July 1967.
[edit] Selected works by Morris Swadesh
- 1950. "Salish internal relationships", International Journal of American Linguistics 16, 157-167.
- 1952. "Lexicostatistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts", Proceedings American Philosophical Society 96, 452-463.
- 1955. "Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating", International Journal of American Linguistics 21, 121-137.
- 1962. "Linguistic relations across the Bering Strait", American Anthropologist 64, 1262-1291.
[edit] References
- Esterhill, Frank. 2000. Interlingua Institute: A History. New York: Interlingua Institute.
- 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."
- Price, David H. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3326-0
- Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994. On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy." Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
[edit] External links
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Look up Swadesh list in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
