This list of words was devised by the linguist Morris Swadesh. He used it as a means of determining the closeness of any pair of languages. It is a useful list of the most common words that are essential to most languages (and may be used in learning basic communication in other languages—even multiple languages at once—since, for basic communication, vocabulary is generally more useful than a knowledge of the target language’s syntax [it is even possible to learn basic communication with no knowledge of the target language’s syntax]). For a basis to expand this list into other languages see Wiktionary:Swadesh template
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