Talk:Morris Swadesh

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the science and academia work group.

Linguistics

	Linguistics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Linguistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of linguistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LinguisticsWikipedia:WikiProject LinguisticsTemplate:WikiProject LinguisticsLinguistics articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

	Indigenous peoples of the Americas portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the Americas, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Indigenous peoples of the Americas on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Indigenous peoples of the AmericasWikipedia:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the AmericasTemplate:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the AmericasIndigenous peoples of the Americas articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Chicago Low‑importance

	Chicago portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Chicago, which aims to improve all articles or pages related to Chicago or the Chicago metropolitan area.ChicagoWikipedia:WikiProject ChicagoTemplate:WikiProject ChicagoChicago articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Verifiability re Oct. 22, 2009

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]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Morris Swadesh. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 02:23, 7 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]