Swadesh, Morris

Swadesh, Morris (1909–67) linguist; born in Holyoke, Mass. Child of immigrant Russian Jews, he grew up knowing Russian and Yiddish. He took his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Chicago under Edward Sapir, who in 1931 brought Swadesh with him to Yale, where Swadesh took his Ph.D. (1933). He spent part of every year throughout the 1930s doing fieldwork with Native Americans and became familiar with many of their languages. He taught at the University of Wisconsin (1937–39), then went to Mexico to head a program of education for native Mexicans while serving as professor at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional de Mexico (1939–41). During World War II he served in the language section of the U.S. Army (1942–46) and edited dictionaries and teaching materials for several languages. After teaching one year at the City College of New York (1948–49), he was fired due to the McCarthyism that drove out academics with "leftist sympathies." Supported by various grants, he worked for several years on an ambitious project to trace the relationships among all American Indian languages, one of his major concerns and contributions. He returned to Mexico as a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma and at the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (1956–67). Honored as among the first generation to develop modern linguistic analysis in the U.S.A., he initiated or was associated with many new approaches such as phonemics, pattern analysis of linguistic structure, and glottochronology. Author of 22 books and over 130 articles, he was especially known for his work on the origin and evolution of language, effectively founding what is known as prehistoric linguistics.