[Lingtyp] Ethnologue goes for paid access?

Sun Jan 3 16:47:59 UTC 2016

I have been reading all of your emails and sitting quietly on the following
input I received following my "complaint" about Ethnologue on Christmas
Day. I don't know that Steve intended this to be public, but see what you
think about at least his view of why the change to paid subscriptions. I
wrote to him that I was shocked not to be able to get to ANY pages of
Ethnologue (I don't know where the 7 page availability is to be found)
without warning (I hadn't been following the blog he mentions or heard
about this any other way and felt they should have at least put an
explanation of some sort on the subscription page). See what you think:

Dear Larry,

I appreciate you taking the time to contact us about your dismay. Thank you
for sharing.

I am sorry that it was shocking; and on Christmas Day. We did write a blog
post about this on December 1st
<http://www.ethnologue.com/ethnoblog/m-paul-lewis/ethnologue-launches-subscription-service>,
but I realize that not everyone reads the Ethnoblog.

For many years we've had a big vision for enhancing and expanding the value
of Ethnologue.com, but we haven't had an economic model that enabled us to
actually do it. It's our hope that subscriptions will be part of a viable
economic model that enables us not just to sustain Ethnologue, but to
invest in making it even better. Imagine if we could afford to add L2 data
to Ethnologue, digital vitality index, interactive maps, an Ethnologue app
for smartphones, etc. That's where we want to go, but we can't go there
until we find a economic model that enables it. We've already got some
enhancements in the pipeline, but we need the new revenue to bring them to
the world.

We have put together both instructional subscriptions (for teachers and
professors) as well as institutional subscriptions. Both of these options
provide economical ways to provide access to Ethnologue for lots of people.
If that's something that might be helpful to you please let me know.

Steve Moitozo

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 8:17 AM, William Croft <wcroft at unm.edu> wrote:

> 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> 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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-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director,
France-Berkeley Fund
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=19
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