Appendix:Swadesh lists
Swadesh lists were originally devised by the linguist Morris Swadesh. In the 1940s to 1950s, Swadesh developed word lists of body parts, verbs, natural phenomena, in order to compute the relationships of languages, and in particular their age, by a method called glottochronology. Swadesh's version of glottochronology is outdated because it used constant replacement rates. There are, of course, many attempts to achieve more realistic rates and thus more realistic results.
A Swadesh list may also be useful to achieve knowledge of some universal terms in other languages. This is because, for basic communication, knowledge of vocabulary is more important than knowledge of grammar and syntax. Sometimes it is even possible to achieve (very) basic communication skills with no knowledge of the target language syntax whatsoever.
To sort the table columns here (or for any other table in any HTML page), copy the javascript link from here (control-click the "sort table" link to copy the link) and once you have come back to this page, paste the javascript code you have copied into your URL window and run it. (The other table scripts there can also be used here.) Alternatively, instead of copying the link, you could drag it into your bookmarks toolbar, allowing the link to be accessible in the future from the toolbar. This sorting feature could be particularly useful if and when the categories of the Swadesh template and/or Basic English template are fleshed out.