petition for KOTUS

[Johanna Laakso]

Dear Colleagues,

The Finnish Ministry of Education is planning extensive cuts to the
funding of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland ("Kotus",
www.kotus.fi). This would force Kotus to cut down its personnel by one
third by 2015, which would endanger many important functions and make the
initiation of new projects practically impossible.

Many concerned colleagues and other citizens (by now, more than 1200) have
already signed a group petition for Kotus now available (in Finnish and
Swedish) at
http://www.adressit.com/kotus_focis . If you read Finnish or Swedish and
feel concerned for Kotus and its services (such as the corpus server
kaino.kotus.fi or the new online version of the Finnish grammar "Iso
suomen kielioppi" at http://scripta.kotus.fi/visk/ ), please visit the
link and consider signing.

Best
JL

PS. Like many Finno-Ugrists, I find it very difficult to sympathize with
Kotus's policy of consistently neglecting minor Finno-Ugric languages
(with the small exception of Sámi): as the great Finno-Ugric dictionary
projects are finished and the personnel retires, no new Finno-Ugrists are
hired and no new research projects initiated. However, this problem
(which, of course, is part of a greater question of the role of Finnish
research institutions in  Finno-Ugric studies) will certainly not be
solved by further cuts in the funding of Kotus.


-- 
--
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Universität Wien
EVSL Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
Campus AAKH Spitalg. 2-4 Hof 7
A-1090 Wien
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at || http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/

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