DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC ENCOUNTER OF A BASIC VOCABULARY

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to compare the concepts, selecting criteria and word lists of the basic vocabulary suggested in historical linguistics and language pedagogy, and to show the similarities and correlations between the two. In linguistics, the term of a basic vocabulary is mainly used in two fields, in historical linguistics and language pedagogy. First, this term became well-known in the area of historical linguistics by Swadesh in 1950s for glottochronology which is the field dealing with the chronological relationships between languages, and today it is also used in lexicostatistics. Secondly, we can find also the use of the term of a basic vocabulary in a number of studies concerning language education like language teaching and learning, and lexicography. Until now, two concepts of the basic vocabulary suggested in these two fields have been separately dealt with and thus regarded as different from each other. But the close inspection on them shows that the concepts of a basic vocabulary suggested two fields are not clearly distinguished from each other, and furthermore, they share common characteristics in the basic concepts, selecting criteria and word lists, although they each are based on the different data from different viewpoints.