IE and Substrates and Time

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

>>BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by the SIT

SI*L* (The Summer Institute of Linguistics)

>>that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN info.)

UN ? Heaven forbid. The moment the SIL takes over the UN I'm going to
change planets.
Seriously, the SIL is a private organisation, founded by Kenneth Pike (also
known as language theoretician, the founder of Tagmemic Grammar). Its
members are field linguists who over the decades have produced some very
fine pieces of work on a great deal of hitherto undescribed languages of
the world, mostly in Central America, Africa and the Pacific. I respect
their linguistic output very much, use it regularly and wouldn't want to be
without it.
At the same time it should not be overlooked that the prime object of SIL's
activity is not so much linguistics (this is a necessary side-effect), but
rather Bible translation and straightforward mission, hence my initial
sentence (and that's why they got kicked out of some countries, where any
field-linguist may now have a hard time explaining that s/he is not one of
them, as it happened to me).
The Ethnologue is a language catalogue which is remarkably detailed and
complete (if there can be such a thing as a complete language catalogue at
all). Unlike other works of the kind, it is regularly updated and
web-accessible. The information found there on language classification,
though, is not always the result of original research and should be read
with a critical eye (as the Alemannic part demonstrates, inter alia). But
if you encounter a language/dialect name you've never heard of before, you
are more likely to find it mentioned in this book than anywhere else, and
at least you'll find a rather precise localisation for the lg. (that is the
one most important piece of information for a missionary ;-).

St.G.

Stefan Georg
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