[Lingtyp] Ethnologue goes for paid access?

[William Croft]

I'll start by commenting on what seems to be a side issue that Matthew and Dan raised, re public and private universities, but it will come back to the issue of the role of SIL.

Over the past few decades, US states have cut back their support of higher education to as little as 5% of the state university's budget. So public institutions now generate their revenue largely like private institutions: tuition, fundraising, and government grants. But even government grants for research have been cut. The same has happened in the UK, where free tuition was abandoned and the government has reduced its contribution to the universities, and research funding is harder and harder to obtain. My understanding is that state funding for higher education has also been reduced recently in other European countries.

In other words, our societies, through our elected representatives, have decided that higher education, and to a lesser extent basic research, are not public goods worth paying for by the society in general (i.e. by the general taxpayer).

As in many other countries, religious organizations step in to provide certain public goods not provided by the government. In addition to Ethnologue and ISO 639-3 codes, SIL also provides Unicode fonts and language documentation software that the linguistics community uses. Their funding stream is greater and steadier than anything that is being provided by government funding. But of course religious organizations also have ideological agendas that many of us do not share.

So what are we going to do? If we condemn or boycott SIL, who is going to provide these public goods for us? Not our governments. Yes, MPI-Leipzig gave us WALS, APiCs, and Glottolog, among other things. But MPI-Leipzig Linguistics is no more, and it is only because MPI-Jena has picked it up that we still benefit. There's no long-term steady support for these resources from the Max Planck Society.

>From what I have heard from SIL linguists, there is a tension in that organization between those who think scientific research is (part of) what SIL does, and those that believe SIL should only be translating the Bible (and converting indigenous peoples). Who knows, maybe introduction of the paywell has something to do with this internal tension. Can we, or should we, support those in SIL who want it to be committed to scientific research as well as missionary work? I'm inclined to say we should, but I don't know how a linguist who is not an evangelical Christian can do so, except by contributing to the cost of their services.

Bill


On Jan 2, 2016, at 1:17 PM, Matthew Dryer <dryer at BUFFALO.EDU<mailto:dryer at BUFFALO.EDU>> wrote:


I think the discussion of SIL and Ethnologue a couple of days ago rather oversimplifies things. The assumption is that because they are a missionary organization, they are not an academic organization. The fact that their primary mission is Bible translation does not change the fact that many people with SIL conduct scientific research. This is especially true for those members of SIL who hold positions at universities but it also includes members of SIL who do not hold university positions but who have PhD’s in linguistics and engage is scientific research. The interest these people have in linguistic research is no different from the interest that non-SIL academics have in linguistic research. Their interest in linguistics is simply something that runs in parallel to their religious beliefs and their interest in Bible translation. It is clear that Kenneth Pike, who was president of SIL from 1942 to 1979, considered one of the major goals of SIL to be language description as an end in itself. It is for that reason that SIL is both a missionary organization and an academic organization.

While Dan is right about the origin and impetus for Ethnologue within SIL, it is clear that the primary motivation for those who have been most involved in Ethnologue is scientific. SIL has had a crucial role in the assignment of ISO codes because it is an academic organization.

We typologists owe an immense debt to SIL, for there is no academic institution or organization that has produced more than a fraction of the language description that has been produced by SIL (except, perhaps, Australian National University), something that is crucial for typologists whose work relies on language descriptions.

Matthew

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