Appendix:Portuguese Swadesh list

This is a Swadesh list of words in Portuguese, compared with definitions in English.

For further information, including the full final version of the list, read the Wikipedia article: Swadesh list.

American linguist Morris Swadesh believed that languages changed at measurable rates and that these could be determined even for languages without written precursors. Using vocabulary lists, he sought to understand not only change over time but also the relationships of extant languages. To be able to compare languages from different cultures, he based his lists on meanings he presumed would be available in as many cultures as possible. He then used the fraction of agreeing cognates between any two related languages to compute their divergence time by some (still debated) algorithms. Starting in 1950 with 165 meanings, his list grew to 215 in 1952, which was so expansive that many languages lacked native vocabulary for some terms. Subsequently, it was reduced to 207, and reduced much further to 100 meanings in 1955. A reformulated list was published posthumously in 1971.

• Orthography :

When the words have various forms (verbs conjugation, gender and number agreement, declensions), the orthography is the following :

• verbs : infinitive
• other words : masculine or neutral, singular, nominative (subject)

For specific cases (no infinitive, feminine name, plural name for instance), the simplest form is used.

• Pronunciation :

The showed pronunciation is the pronunciation generally used in Portugal (EP) and/or in Brazil (BP). Depending on the speakers and the area, the actual pronunciation may differ, more or less significantly, from the showed pronunciation.

• Dictionnaire de poche français-portugais / portugais-français, Hachette & Verbo, Paris 2005 - →ISBN
• Les langages de l'humanité (Michel Malherbe), Robert Laffont, Paris 1995 - →ISBN

• Portuguese dictionaries (Lexilogos)
• Appendix:Romance Swadesh lists
• Wikcionário (Portuguese Wiktionary)