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What Morris Swadesh did was at the same time simpler and greater than that: he created a list of concepts likely to pop up across many different languages, regardless of their time period and area. This is extremely useful to track the relationship between multiple languages, even if you don’t speak them.
I’m not sure if he created one for Proto-Indo-European; “Swadesh list” became a generic name for this sort of list, regardless of who compiles it. Plus Morris Swadesh main interest was Amerindian languages.
[Shameless advertisement: we have a linguistics community, [email protected] . I’m the mod there; I apologise for the relative lack of activity nowadays, but everyone is welcome to post this sort of stuff there.]
What Morris Swadesh did was at the same time simpler and greater than that: he created a list of concepts likely to pop up across many different languages, regardless of their time period and area. This is extremely useful to track the relationship between multiple languages, even if you don’t speak them.
I’m not sure if he created one for Proto-Indo-European; “Swadesh list” became a generic name for this sort of list, regardless of who compiles it. Plus Morris Swadesh main interest was Amerindian languages.
FWIW, the link says he was the initial compiler, but it was revised after his death.