Talk:Morris Swadesh

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Verifiability re Oct. 22, 2009 edit

Latest comment: 14 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

As the second daughter of Morris Swadesh I went with him when he went to Vancouver Island in the summer of 1948 to do further field work on Nootka, and visited him in Mexico City in the summers for 5 years, beginning in 1956. We visited one of the villages in Michoacan where he had worked and people immediately recognized him, although some 18 years had passed. During that time my mother returned to the Mezquital to continue studies of Otomi. While I don't fully understand my father's work, as with most children a great deal seeped in naturally over the years. He worked with basic dictionaries of hundreds of Native American languages developed by linguists in the field, including missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics; he would compare one language with another, one word at a time, an arduous task before the development of computers. He would work from 8 in the morning until sometimes 10 at night--with breaks--(he was beginning to work with computers with punch cards when I left in 1963). He helped establish linguistic connections of many languages--two better known examples are Uto-Aztecan (the Aztecs of Mexico City had a tradition that they had come from the north, and their language, Nahuatl, is closely related to Ute) and the Dine-Dene connection--the Navajo and their close cousins of Canada, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hijasegunda (talk • contribs) 00:52, 23 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

Seeking further information and sources I was again impressed with the tremendous amount of work involved in comparative linguistics. In collected works of Edward Sapir I found Sapir had made a 1920 map of proposed classification of American Indian languages, (and there's an sketchier map in color in the Wikipedia entry for him). What Swadesh did was confirm, correct and extend those preliminary analyses. Also, Dell Hymes' on Swadesh in Origin and Diversification of Language, said, "The two "Yale schools" (Sapir and Bloomfield) were not sharply opposed. In neither case was there homogeneity of view, but rather a great deal of close collaboration and discussion among persons diverse in background, outlook, and subsequent career....certainly Sapir and Bloomfield held each other in high respect." None of that work would have been done without the work of many, many people.

One of the things that Swadesh was very good at was explaining things in laypeople's language so others could grasp it. Once, in Mexico City when I was struggling with Spanish grammar, he pointed out a billboard as we were driving along a major street. It was an advertisement for a movie, "El Mano Negra", and he asked me if it was correct. Suddenly a whole area of grammar fell into place in my mind when I understood it was El (Hombre con la) Mano Negra. --Hijasegunda (talk) 22:00, 11 November 2009 (UTC)--Hijasegunda (talk) 22:08, 11 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

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Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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