The Swadesh List is used by documentary linguists for a similar reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list T

The Swadesh List is used by documentary linguists for a similar reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list There are just some things all human speaker communities need to talk about. Since these tend to be "ultraconserved" words, using the Swadesh list is a great way to understand the lineage of a given under-documented language, but a bad way to understand any rule-based mechanisms associated with that language such as morphology associated with inflection or declension.