The Swadesh list, however, was based mainly on intuition, according to Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor.
[2] In origin, the words in the Swadesh lists were chosen for their universal, culturally independent availability in as many languages as possible, regardless of their "stability".
Nevertheless, the stability of the resulting list of "universal" vocabulary under language change and the potential use of this fact for purposes of glottochronology have been analyzed by numerous authors, including Marisa Lohr 1999, 2000.
Experts on 41 languages from across the world were given a uniform vocabulary list and asked to provide the words for each item in the language on which they were an expert, as well as information on how strong the evidence was that each word was borrowed.
A quarter of the words in the Leipzig–Jakarta list are human body parts: mouth, eye, leg/foot, navel, liver, knee, etc.