biography
pronunciation:
[swodesh]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1909–67)
|
| biography:
| Linguist, born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, USA. The child of immigrant Russian Jews, he grew up knowing Russian and Yiddish. He took his BA and MA at the University of Chicago under Edward Sapir, who brought Swadesh with him to Yale (1931), where he took his PhD (1933). He spent part of every year throughout the 1930s doing fieldwork with Native Americans, and became familiar with many of their languages. He taught at the University of Wisconsin (1937–9), then went to Mexico to head a programme of education for native Mexicans while serving as professor at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional de Mexico (1939–41). During World War 2 he served in the language section of the US Army (1942–6) and edited dictionaries and teaching materials for several languages. After teaching one year at the City College of New York (1948–9), he was dismissed due to the McCarthyism that drove out academics with ‘leftist sympathies’. Supported by various grants, he worked for several years on an ambitious project to trace the relationships among all American Indian languages, one of his major concerns and contributions. He returned to Mexico as a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma and at the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (1956–67). Honoured as among the first generation to develop modern linguistic analysis in the USA, he initiated or was associated with many new approaches such as phonemics, pattern analysis of linguistic structure, and glottochronology. Author of 22 books and over 130 articles, he was especially known for his work on the origin and evolution of language, effectively founding what is known as prehistoric linguistics. |
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