Morris Swadesh (January 22, 1909 - July 20, 1967) was an American linguist. Swadesh studied with Edward Sapir. He is famous for compiling the controversial Swadesh List, a list of common words which are essential to most languages, and used to determine the closeness of any pair of languages. This technique is called lexico-statistics[?] and glottochronology.
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