Swadesh list

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

There are two basic versions of Swadesh list, one with 200 meanings, the other with 100 meanings. In the composite listing on this page, there are actually 207 meanings in total, since seven of the entries in the 100-meaning list (breast, fingernail, full, horn, knee, moon, round) were not in the original 200-meaning list. To see which words are in which lists, see Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix.

Usage in lexicostatistics and glottochronology

The Swadesh word list is used in lexicostatistics and glottochronology to determine the approximate date of first separation of genetically related languages, 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 'chakra' 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, and the use of robust statistical models, borrowed from phylogenetics.

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 Indo-European 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), although the criticism has very little concrete basis, apart from verbal argument.^{[citation needed]}) Gray and Atkinson use models developed for the analysis of phylogenetic relationships in biology and it remains unclear whether any critical violations of the models' assumptions are violated in the course of language evolution. It remains to be seen if the method will achieve wide acceptance in linguistics.

Swadesh list in English

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.

Shorter lists

The Swadesh–Yakhontov list is a 35-word subset of the Swadesh list posited as especially stable by Russian linguist Sergei Yakhontov (Starostin 1991). It has been used in lexicostatistics by linguists such as Sergei Starostin. With their Swadesh numbers, they are:

Holman et al. (2008) found that the Swadesh-Yakhontov list was less accurate than the Swadesh-100 list in identifying the relationships between Chinese dialects. However, they calculated the relative stability of the words by comparing retentions between languages in established language families, and found that a different 40-word list was just as accurate as the Swadesh-100 list. They found no statistically significant difference is the correlations in the families of the Old versus the New World. The ranked Swadesh-100 list, with Swadesh numbers and relative stability, is as follows (Holman et al., Appendix. Asterisked words appear on the 40-word list):

See also

• A General Service List of English Words
• Swadesh lists for hundreds of languages, listed by individual language, on the Wiktionary Swadesh Lists Category pages
• Swadesh lists for hundreds of languages, grouped by language family, on the Wiktionary Appendix pages
• Lexicostatistics
• Glottochronology
• Mass lexical comparison
• Basic English
• Historical linguistics
• Proto-language
• cognate
• Indo-European studies
• The (brief) Wiktionary entry for the term 'Swadesh lists'

References

• Campbell, Lyle. (1998). Historical linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0262532670.
• 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. inDiachronica 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.
• Holm, Hans J. (2007). The new Arboretum of Indo-European "Trees". Can New Algorithms Reveal the Phylogeny and Even Prehistory of Indo-European? Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, vol. 14, 167–214.
• Holman, Wichmann, Brown, Velupillai, Müller, Bakker (2008). "Explorations in automated language classification". Folia Linguistica 42.2: 331–354
• Sankoff, David (1970). "On the Rate of Replacement of Word-Meaning Relationships."Language 46.564–569.
• Starostin (1991). Altajskaja Problema i Proisxozhdenie Japonskogo Jazyka [The Altaic

Problem and the Origin of the Japanese Language]. Moscow: Nauka

• 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. (1971). The origin and diversification of language. Edited post mortem by Joel Sherzer. Chicago: Aldine. ISBN 202-01001-5. Contains p 283 final 100-word list!
• Swadesh, Morris, et al. (1972). What is glottochronology? In M. Swadesh, The Origin and Diversification of Language (pp. 271–284). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0202308413.
• Wittmann, Henri (1969). "A lexico-statistic inquiry into the diachrony of Hittite."Indogermanische Forschungen 74.1-10.[1]
• Wittmann, Henri (1973). "The lexicostatistical classification of the French-based Creole languages." Lexicostatistics in genetic linguistics: Proceedings of the Yale conference, April 3–4, 1971, dir. Isidore Dyen, 89–99. La Haye: Mouton.[2]

External links

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