How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages (fwd)

Tue Jul 19 20:20:48 UTC 2005

"Conclusion
SIL/WBT propaganda describes the organization as "a
private, non-profit, non-sectarian scientific
education, international organization."  But the
reality of its insidious work around the world, both
in terms of its objectives and its effects is its
truly destructive impact upon the languages, the
cultures, and the beliefs of indigenous peoples who
are targets of SIL/WBT programs.  The illegitimacy of
their work is compounded when they make room for U.S.
(or other) business interests, either by driving
indigenous groups out of their homes and land, or by
providing the business interests with a pool of cheap
labor.
'There is an obvious question that must be asked:  Are
the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the Wycliffe
Bible Translators, and the Jungle Aviation and Radio
Service working directly or indirectly for the CIA?"
  --ibid p46

http://www.cwis.org/fwdp/International/russell.txt
"Declaration of Indigenous Peoples
[item 6.]  ..."In particular we would ask the Tribunal
to immediately condemn, and in the future, completely
investigate the activities of that great common
danger, The Summer Institute of Linguistics."

"However, Colby & Dennett had heard of a darker side
to SIL.  Numerous critics had alleged that SIL was the
vanguard of the destruction of both the rainforests
and their native inhabitants.  They had heard from
Latin American acquintances that SIL was, in military
fashion, a scouting party that surveyed the Amazonian
hinterlands for potential sources of opposition to
natural resource exploitation (read cattle ranching,
clearcutting and strip mining) among native peoples
and that it employed avirulent brand of Christian
fundamentalism that relied on linguistics to undermine
the soical cohesion of aboriginal communities and
accelerate their assimilation into Western culture. 
In addition to all this, numerous articles in the
Latin American press accused SIL of being funded by
the American intelligence community."
  --Dark Night, no.14, Chicago

"On 13 March 1987 El Nacional of Caracas revealed that
missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics
had entered Venezuela illegally in August of the
previous year and had been able to establish a base
among the Panare Indians in the neighbourhood of
Caicar.  The newspaper noted that this missionary sect
- following denunciation by the United Nations and the
Organization of American States- had already had its
contract rescinded or been actualy expelled by the
governments of Mexicao, Ecuador, Brazil, Panama and
Colombia."
  --The Missionaries, Norman Lewis, p242

"The activities of the SIL and other North American
evangelical groups have earned the hostility of
indigenous peoples and, after widespread protests
those missionaries have been banned altogether in some
countries."
  -Report from the Frontier, Julian Burger, p51

April 18,1981- 'a communique released to the press
calling SIL/WBT (Wycliffe Bible Translators):  "an
affront to...our national sovereignty....a means by
which the plunder of our national resources is
institutionalized," proponents of enforced
sterilization of the Indians, and a front for the
CIA.'
[Philadelphia Inquirer, 01/28/81; Los Angeles Times,
02/08/81; Boston globe, 03/08/81]
  -CAQ, #18,Winter 83

'The connection between WBT & SIL was repeatedly
denied until Aug 1953, when the Catholic bishops in
Lima denounced the Summer Insitute of Linguistics...'
  --ibid p42

'"Twenty-five years ago the Shell Oil Company lost
many workers to Auca spears.  For several reasons
Shell decided to leave Ecuador.  Suddenly with the
discovery of a vast reserve of oil under the Eastern
Jungle, twenty-one companies are working 1500 men
there.  As they advance, we fly ahead of them &
explain to Aucas living in their path that they are
coming.  We persuade them that they should move out of
the way.  This is done by Auca Christians through a
loudspeaker mounted on the plane.  As the Indians
move, we notify the oil companies.  As a result of
this close coordination by radio & telephone through
our Quito office, there has not been one life lost to
date.  PRAISE GOD!!."
  -Laurie Hart, "Pacifying the Last Frontiers:  Story
of the Wycliffe Translators, NACLA's Latin American &
Empire Report, Dec 1973, page 22." '
  --ibid p45

"Cam's effort to get Bible translators into the muslim
world through its back door, the Soviet Union,was no
more successful.  It was not for want of trying.  He
made eleven trips to the Soviet Union, mostly to the
oil-rich Caucasus.  But the charges that SIL had had
links to the CIA in Vietnam and Latin America were
having their effect, Pravda calling SIL a "nest of
spies."'
  --Thy Will be Done, The Conquest of the Amazon: 
Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.
 Colby & Dennett pp798-99.

- some interesting citations from field literature re:
 SIL

Richard

--- phil cash cash <cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU> wrote:

> July 19, 2005
> How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of
> 6,912 Languages
> 
> By MICHAEL ERARD
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/science/19lang.html
> 
> Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a
> sprawling compendium
> of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are
> sign languages for
> the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one
> artificial language
> has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most
> languages have fewer
> than a million speakers, and the most linguistically
> diverse nation on
> the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse?
> Haiti.
> 
> Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read
> about Garo, spoken
> by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in
> India, which is written
> with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by
> 2,000 people in
> Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide
> for Christian
> missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it
> is a source for
> academics and governments, and the occasional game
> show.
> 
> Though its unusual history draws some criticism
> among secular linguists,
> the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If
> I'm teaching field
> methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go
> look it up in
> Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics
> chairman at the University
> of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to
> locate it in the
> language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the
> one-stop place to
> look."
> 
> Yet Ethnologue's most curious fact highlights a
> quandary that has long
> perplexed linguists: how many languages are spoken
> on the planet?
> 
> Estimates have ranged from 3,000 to 10,000, but
> Ethnologue confidently
> counts 6,912 languages. Curiously, this edition adds
> 103 languages to
> the 6,809 that were listed in its 2000 edition - at
> a time when
> linguists are making dire predictions that hundreds
> of languages will
> soon become extinct.
> 
> "I occasionally note in my comments to the press,"
> said Nicholas Ostler,
> the president of the Foundation for Endangered
> Languages, "the irony
> that Ethnologue's total count of known languages
> keeps going up with
> each four-yearly edition, even as we solemnly intone
> the factoid that a
> language dies out every two weeks."
> 
> This dissonance points to a more basic problem.
> "There's no actual
> number of languages," said Merritt Ruhlen, a
> linguist at Stanford whose
> own count is "around" 4,580. "It kind of depends on
> how one defines
> dialects and languages."
> 
> The linguists behind the Ethnologue agree that the
> distinctions can be
> indistinct. "We tend to see languages as basically
> marbles, and we're
> trying to get all the marbles in our bag and count
> how many marbles we
> have," said M. Paul Lewis, a linguist who manages
> the Ethnologue
> database (www.ethnologue.com) and will edit the 16th
> edition. "Language
> is a lot more like oatmeal, where there are some
> clearly defined units
> but it's very fuzzy around the edges."
> 
> The Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich once famously
> said, "A shprakh iz a
> dialekt mit an armey un a flot" (or "a language is a
> dialect with an
> army and a navy"). To Ethnologue, and to the
> language research
> organization that produces it, S.I.L. International,
> a language is a
> dialect that needs its literature, including a
> Bible.
> 
> Based in Dallas, S.I.L. (which stands for Summer
> Institute of
> Linguistics) trains missionaries to be linguists,
> sending them to learn
> local languages, design alphabets for unwritten
> languages and introduce
> literacy. Before they begin translating the Bible,
> they find out how
> many translations are needed by testing the degree
> to which speech
> varieties are mutually unintelligible. "The
> definition of language we
> use in the Ethnologue places a strong emphasis,"
> said Dr. Lewis, "on
> the ability to intercommunicate as the test for
> splitting or joining."
> 
> Thus, the fewer words from Dialect B that a speaker
> of Dialect A can
> understand, the more likely S.I.L. linguists will
> say that A and B need
> two Bibles, not one. The entry for the Chadian
> language of Bernde, for
> example, rates its similarity to its six neighboring
> languages from 47
> to 73 percent. Above 70 percent, two varieties will
> typically be called
> dialects of the same language.
> 
> However, such tests are not always clear-cut.
> Unintelligible dialects
> are sometimes combined into one language if they
> share a literature or
> other cultural heritage. And the reverse can be
> true, as in the case of
> Danish and Norwegian.
> 
> In Guatemala, Ethnologue counts 54 living languages,
> while other
> linguists, some of them native Mayan speakers, count
> 18. Yet
> undercounting can be just as political as
> overcounting.
> 
> Colette Grinevald, a specialist in Latin American
> languages at Lumière
> University in Lyon, France, notes that the modern
> Maya political
> movement wants to unite under one language,
> Kaqkchikel. "They don't
> want that division of their language into 24
> languages," she said.
> "They want to create a standard called Kaqkchikel."
> 
> Beyond its political implications, the Ethnologue
> also carries the
> weight of a religious mission. The project was
> founded by Richard
> Pittman, a missionary who thought other missionaries
> needed better
> information about which languages lacked a Bible.
> The first version
> appeared in 1951, 10 mimeographed pages that
> described 40 languages.
> 
> "Hardly anyone knew about the Ethnologue back then,"
> said Barbara
> Grimes, who edited the survey from 1967 to 2000. "It
> was a good idea,
> but it wasn't very impressive." In 1971, Ms. Grimes
> and her husband,
> Joseph Grimes, a linguistics professor at Cornell,
> extended the survey
> from small languages to all languages in the world.
> 
> What emerged was just how daunting a global Bible
> translation project
> was. "In 1950, when we joined S.I.L., we were
> telling each other, maybe
> there are about 1,000 languages, but nobody really
> knew," Ms. Grimes
> said. In 1969, Ethnologue listed 4,493 languages; in
> 1992, the number
> had risen to 6,528 and by 2000 it stood at 6,809.
> 
> The number will probably continue to rise - 2,694
> languages still need
> to be studied in detail, and in 2000, S.I.L.
> officials projected that
> at the current rate of work, a complete survey would
> not be completed
> until 2075. (They now say they are working to speed
> it up.) As for
> their goal of translating the Bible, Ethnologue's
> figures show that all
> or some of it is available in 2,422 languages.
> 
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