6. Uniformitarianism in Recent Linguistics. In
1950 Morris Swadesh launched a method, glotto-
chronology, that deserves mention here because it
proposed a uniformitarian refinement of the compara-
tive method. It had two main postulates: (1) The
vocabulary of any language can be divided into two
parts, the basic vocabulary and the rest; languages may
differ in their nonbasic vocabularies, but all languages
agree in the meanings expressed in their basic vocabu-
laries. (2) Change in a language's basic vocabulary
(which consists in the replacement of one item by
another item with the same meaning) proceeds at a
more or less constant rate for all languages at all times.
It is postulate (2), uniform rate of change for re-
placements in basic vocabularies, that makes the
method uniformitarian. To determine this constant
rate, it was assumed that replacement, which is dis-
crete, could be represented without serious distortion as
a continuous process amenable to the differential and
integral calculus. Under that assumption, there resulted
as a corollary to postulate (2) a half-life principle just
as in the mathematical model for radioactive decay.
And actually it was the application to radioactive
decay, and especially its recent application in arche-
ology to radiocarbon dating, that inspired Swadesh's
method and aroused hopes for it (Swadesh, 1952).
After about a decade of discussion both postulates
came to be judged unrealistic (Hymes [1964], pp.
567-663, including pp. 622-23, a bibliography). How-
ever, the basic ideas of the method have not been
shown to be wrong in principle.
