Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh (January 22, 1909 - July 20, 1967) was an American linguist. Swadesh studied with Edward Sapir. He is famous for compiling the controversial Swadesh list, a list of common words which are essential to most languages, and used to determine the closeness of any pair of languages. This technique is called lexico-statistics and glottochronology.

See also the Swadesh lists at Wiktionary