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Swadesh list

Encyclopedia

A Swadesh list is one of several lists of vocabulary with basic meanings, developed by Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh 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...

in the 1940–50s, which is used in lexicostatistics

Lexicostatistics

Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...

(quantitative language relatedness assessment) and glottochronology

Glottochronology

Glottochronology is an approach in historical linguistics for estimating the time at which languages diverged, based on the assumption that the basic vocabulary of a language changes at a constant average rate...

(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

Cognate

Cognates in linguistics are words that have a common etymological origin.An example of cognates within the same language would be English shirt and skirt, the former from Old English scyrte, the latter loaned from Old Norse skyrta, both from the same Common Germanic *skurtjōn-. Words with this type...

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

Chakra

Chakra is a Sanskrit word that translates as "wheel" or "turning"....

' 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

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...

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

Phylogenetics

In biology, phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms , which is discovered through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices...

.

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

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia...

with absolute dates for its nodes, using Bayesian

Bayesian inference

Bayesian inference is statistical inference in which evidence or observations are used to update or to newly infer the probability that a hypothesis may be true. The name "Bayesian" comes from the frequent use of Bayes' theorem in the inference process...

principles, dating the Proto-Indo-European language

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction...

to ca. 7000 BC (see Indo-Hittite

Indo-Hittite

In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off the Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages...

). The study, which begins with a merciless criticism of the earlier forms of glottochronology

Glottochronology

Glottochronology is an approach in historical linguistics for estimating the time at which languages diverged, based on the assumption that the basic vocabulary of a language changes at a constant average rate...

, is based on the set of 200-word swadesh lists compiled by Isidore Dyen

Isidore Dyen

Isidore Dyen was an American linguist, Professor Emeritus of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics at Yale University. He was one of the foremost scholars in the field of Austronesian linguistics....

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

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...

(cf. e.g. Campbell 1998:177ff), although the criticism has very little concrete basis, apart from verbal argument.) 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.

I
you (singular)
he
we
you (plural)
they
this
that
here
there
who
what
where
when
how
not
all
many
some
few
other
one
two
three
four
five
big
long
wide
thick
heavy
small
short
narrow
thin
woman
man (adult male)
Man (human being)
child
wife
husband
mother
father
animal
fish
bird
dog
louse
snake
worm
tree
forest
stick
fruit
seed
leaf
root
bark
flower
grass
rope
skin
meat
blood
bone
fat (n.)
egg
horn
tail
feather
hair
head
ear
eye
nose
mouth
tooth
tongue
fingernail
foot
leg
knee
hand
wing
belly
guts
neck
back
breast
heart
liver
drink
eat
bite
suck
spit
vomit
blow
breathe
laugh
see
hear
know
think
smell
fear
sleep
live
die
kill
fight
hunt
hit
cut
split
stab
scratch
dig
swim
fly (v.)
walk
come
lie
sit
stand
turn
fall
give
hold
squeeze
rub
wash
wipe
pull
push
throw
tie
sew
count
say
sing
play
float
flow
freeze
swell
sun
moon
star
water
rain
river
lake
sea
salt
stone
sand
dust
earth
cloud
fog
sky
wind
snow
ice
smoke
fire
ashes
burn
road
mountain
red
green
yellow
white
black
night
day
year
warm
cold
full
new
old
good
bad
rotten
dirty
straight
round
sharp
dull
smooth
wet
dry
correct
near
far
right
left
at
in
with
and
if
because
name

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

Lexicostatistics

Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...

by linguists such as Sergei Starostin

Sergei Starostin

Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, especially the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis, which assumes that Northwest Caucasian, Northeast...

. With their Swadesh numbers, they are:

1. I

2. you (singular)

7. this

11. who

12. what

22. one

23. two

45. fish

47. dog

48. louse

64. blood

65. bone

67. egg

68. horn

69. tail

73. ear

74. eye

75. nose

77. tooth

78. tongue

83. hand

103. know

109. die

128. give

147. sun

148. moon

150. water

155. salt

156. stone

163. wind

167. fire

179. year

182. full

183. new

207. name

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):

22 *louse (42.8)
12 *two (39.8)
75 *water (37.4)
39 *ear (37.2)
61 *die (36.3)
1 *I (35.9)
53 *liver (35.7)
40 *eye (35.4)
48 *hand (34.9)
58 *hear (33.8)
23 *tree (33.6)
19 *fish (33.4)
100 *name (32.4)
77 *stone (32.1)
43 *tooth (30.7)
51 *breasts (30.7)
2 *you (30.6)
85 *path (30.2)
31 *bone (30.1)
44 *tongue (30.1)
28 *skin (29.6)
92 *night (29.6)
25 *leaf (29.4)
76 rain (29.3)
62 kill (29.2)
30 *blood (29.0)
34 *horn (28.8)
18 *person (28.7)
47 *knee (28.0)
11 *one (27.4)
41 *nose (27.3)
95 *full (26.9)
66 *come (26.8)
74 *star (26.6)
86 *mountain (26.2)
82 *fire (25.7)
3 *we (25.4)
54 *drink (25.0)
57 *see (24.7)
27 bark (24.5)
96 *new (24.3)
21 *dog (24.2)
72 *sun (24.2)
64 fly (24.1)
32 grease (23.4)
73 moon (23.4)
70 give (23.3)
52 heart (23.2)
36 feather (23.1)
90 white (22.7)
89 yellow (22.5)
20 bird (21.8)
38 head (21.7)
79 earth (21.7)
46 foot (21.6)
91 black (21.6)
42 mouth (21.5)
88 green (21.1)
60 sleep (21.0)
7 what (20.7)
26 root (20.5)
45 claw (20.5)
56 bite (20.5)
83 ash (20.3)
87 red (20.2)
55 eat (20.0)
33 egg (19.8)
6 who (19.0)
99 dry (18.9)
37 hair (18.6)
81 smoke (18.5)
8 not (18.3)
4 this (18.2)
24 seed (18.2)
16 woman (17.9)
98 round (17.9)
14 long (17.4)
69 stand (17.1)
97 good (16.9)
17 man (16.7)
94 cold (16.6)
29 flesh (16.4)
50 neck (16.0)
71 say (16.0)
84 burn (15.5)
35 tail (14.9)
78 sand (14.9)
5 that (14.7)
65 walk (14.4)
68 sit (14.3)
10 many (14.2)
9 all (14.1)
59 know (14.1)
80 cloud (13.9)
63 swim (13.6)
49 belly (13.5)
13 big (13.4)
93 hot (11.6)
67 lie (11.2)
15 small (6.3)

External links

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

Swadesh list

Usage in lexicostatistics and glottochronology

Swadesh list in English

Shorter lists

See also

External links