The Phonemic Principle Revisited

This paper discusses and highlights the contribution of Morris Swadesh in the field of Linguistics in general and to the study of phoneme in particular. Swadesh’s phonemic principles played an important role in the development of Linguistics as an independent field of study. Phonemic analysis is one of those questions in the field of Linguistics that will be studied repeatedly, and Swadesh’s observations and analyses in the context of current phonological theory remain relevant to this day. Most of his ideas are still used with different terminology, e.g., minimal pairs, allophones, broad transcription, narrow transcription, etc.. His methods remained under discussion for many years after his seminal paper on phonemic analysis titled The Phonemic Principle was published. Despite of its many strengths, there are number of small weaknesses which are also discussed in this paper.