The Swadesh list isn’t aimed to provide the most basic concepts, but rather words that are likely to survive without changes of meaning. For not so closely related languages it may be difficult to establish what words are actually cognates; cf. German haben and Latin habere with the same meaning aren’t in fact cognates—the actual German cognate of habere is geben and the Latin cognate of haben is capere. Therefore, when linguists want to establish regular phonological correspondences between two related languages, they have to rely on words which are likely to retain their meaning. Those words are usually numerals, concrete nouns, personal pronouns and some well defined concepts, as “cold” or “big”. Actually the list was designed to establish a well-defined measure of the rate of phonological change. Concepts like snake, dog, knee, road, dirty or belly are likely to be expressed by single words and not change their meaning substantially over time, but they are hardly “basic concepts” as an AI designer would probably understand the term.
The Swadesh list isn’t aimed to provide the most basic concepts, but rather words that are likely to survive without changes of meaning. For not so closely related languages it may be difficult to establish what words are actually cognates; cf. German haben and Latin habere with the same meaning aren’t in fact cognates—the actual German cognate of habere is geben and the Latin cognate of haben is capere. Therefore, when linguists want to establish regular phonological correspondences between two related languages, they have to rely on words which are likely to retain their meaning. Those words are usually numerals, concrete nouns, personal pronouns and some well defined concepts, as “cold” or “big”. Actually the list was designed to establish a well-defined measure of the rate of phonological change. Concepts like snake, dog, knee, road, dirty or belly are likely to be expressed by single words and not change their meaning substantially over time, but they are hardly “basic concepts” as an AI designer would probably understand the term.