ABSTRACT
Aware of these problems, Morris Swadesh in 1949 proposed a totally different method. It is based on the assumption that the common words of a language are maintained at a definite rate. While the word for "horse" may have been lost, those for "cow," "fish," "goat," "goose," "louse" have not been. In Swadesh's view, if one identified the words of the basic core vocabulary, and also the rate of loss, one could determine the time when two related languages became independent. He named the method lexicostatistic glottochronology.
