The Swadesh list is a classic compilation of basic concepts for the purposes of historical-comparative linguistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics and glottochronology. Because there are several different lists, some authors also refer to "Swadesh lists".
Versions and authors
himself created several versions of his list. He started with a list of 215 meanings, which he reduced to 165 words for the Salish-Spokane-Kalispel language. In 1952 he published a list of 215 meanings, of which he suggested the removal of 16 for being unclear or not universal, with one added to arrive at 200 words. In 1955 he wrote, "The only solution appears to be a drastic weeding out of the list, in the realization that quality is at least as important as quantity....Even the new list has defects, but they are relatively mild and few in number." After minor corrections the final 100-word list was published posthumously in 1971 and 1972. Other versions of lexicostatistical test lists were published e.g. by Robert Lees, John A. Rea, Dell Hymes, E. Cross, W. J. Samarin, D. Wilson, Lionel Bender, R. L. Oswald, Winfred P. Lehmann, D. Ringe, Sergei Starostin, William S-Y. Wang, M. Lohr. B. Kessler, and many others. The collects various concept lists across different linguistic areas and times, currently listing 240 different concept lists. Frequently used and widely available on the internet, is the version by I. Dyen. Since 2010, a team around M. Dunn has tried to update and enhance that list.
Principle
In origin, the words in the Swadesh lists were chosen for their universal, culturally independent availability in as many languages as possible, regardless of their "stability". Nevertheless, the stability of the resulting list of "universal" vocabulary under language change and the potential use of this fact for purposes of glottochronology have been analyzed by numerous authors, including Marisa Lohr 1999, 2000. The Swadesh list was put together by Morris Swadesh on the basis of his intuitions. More recent similar lists, such as the Dolgopolsky list or the Leipzig–Jakarta list, are based on systematic data from many different languages, but they are not yet as widely known nor as widely used as the Swadesh list.
Usage in lexicostatistics and glottochronology
Lexicostatistical test lists are used in lexicostatistics to define subgroupings of languages, and in glottochronology to "provide dates for branching points in the tree". The task of defining of cognate words in the list is far from trivial, and often is 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 Sanskrit chakra are cognates, although they are not recognizable as such without knowledge of the history of both languages.
Swadesh 100 Original Final List
Swadesh's final list, published in 1971, contains 100 terms. Explanations of the terms can be found in Swadesh 1952 or, where noted by a dagger, in Swadesh 1955. "Claw" was only added in 1955, but again replaced by many well-known specialists with nail, because expressions for "claw" are not available in many old, extinct, or lesser known languages.
Swadesh 207 list
The most used list nowadays is the Swadesh 207-word list, conform Swadesh 1952. In Wiktionary, Panlex and in Palisto's "Swadesh Word List of Indo-European languages" hundreds of Swadesh lists in this form can be found.
Shorter lists
The Swadesh–Yakhontov list is a 35-word subset of the Swadesh list posited as especially stable by Russian linguist Sergei Yakhontov. It has been used in lexicostatistics by linguists such as Sergei Starostin. With their Swadesh numbers, they are: Holman et al. found that in identifying the relationships between Chinese dialects the Swadesh–Yakhontov list was less accurate than the original Swadesh-100 list. Further they found that a different list was just as accurate as the Swadesh-100 list. However, they calculated the relative stability of the words by comparing retentions between languages in established language families. They found no statistically significant difference in 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 :
Sign languages
In studying the sign languages of Vietnam and Thailand, linguist James Woodward noted that the traditional Swadesh list applied to spoken languages was unsuited for sign languages. The Swadesh list results in overestimation of the relationships between sign languages, due to indexical signs such as pronouns and parts of the body. The modified list is as follows, in largely alphabetical order:
