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Morris Swadesh (; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas. In Europe there was a very clear example of language change over centuries: the shift from Latin to the Romance languages (such as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish) that occurred in Europe in fewer than 2000 years. And because these languages were written, it was relatively easy for scholars to gauge the rate of change. Swadesh believed language change to be a basic principle that could be applied to all languages. He spent much of his life comparing hundreds of indigenous languages of the Americas and mapping their relatedness. In the early 19th century, linguists began to comprehend the relatedness of the larger Indo-European family of languages. By the end of the century, linguists were using these principles to identify word similarities and propose language families among the indigenous languages of the Americas. In the 1930s, Swadesh was part of a new generation of linguists developing these insights in greater depth. In the late 1930s Swadesh worked in Mexico with the government as it tried to preserve some of the indigenous languages of Mexico. After the U.S. entered World War II, he returned the U.S. and worked on military projects for the U.S. Army and the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.〔Obituary: Morris Swadesh, ''American Anthropologist,'' vol. 70, 1968, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1968.70.4.02a00070/pdf〕 In the post–World War II years, as the Cold War heightened tensions, he was fired from City College of New York in 1949 due to accusations that he had been a Communist. Effectively blacklisted in United States academia, he emigrated to Mexico City in 1956. He first worked at the ''Instituto Nacional Indigenista.'' He was hired as a full-time researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) (UNAM). He taught at the National School of Anthropology and History (Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia), and lived in Mexico City the rest of his life. ==Early life and education== Swadesh was born in 1909 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia. His parents were multilingual, and he grew up with Yiddish, some Russian, and English as his first languages. Swadesh earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago, where he began studying with the linguist Edward Sapir. He followed Sapir to Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1933. Inspired by Sapir's early lists of word similarities among Native American languages, he began a life work in comparative linguistics. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Morris Swadesh」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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