Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh (1909 to 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics and developed his mature career at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia, he studied at the University of Chicago under Edward Sapir and followed Sapir to Yale, where he completed his doctorate in 1933. He carried out fieldwork on more than twenty indigenous languages of the Americas, most prominently Chitimacha, and from 1937 to 1939 at the University of Wisconsin he organised the Oneida Language and Folklore Project that the young Floyd Lounsbury later completed. He was a pioneer of lexicostatistics and glottochronology and is known for the Swadesh list of basic vocabulary used for cross-linguistic comparison, although some of his wider theories were controversial and have since been deprecated. Dismissed from the City College of New York in 1949 because of his Communist Party membership, he spent most of the rest of his life teaching in Mexico and Canada.