From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 21:51:49 EST
Peter
My message to Edward was off-list and he mistakenly replied to the list. My
apologies for any misunderstanding.
The source of my information about SIL being backed by "very wealthy Christian
Evangelists" was someone who is probably the world's leading expert on
Himalayan Languages & Professor of Linguistics at one of the most prestigious
Universities in Europe. He even named some of the patrons at least one of whom
was a very rich person in the oil business. Given the source, I took the
information
to be reliable.
SIL and "Wycliffe Bible Translators International" also seem to share the same
Executive Officer
- so it's quite natural to assume that the underlying purpose of both
organisations is the same or very similar.
A quick search will also find SIL is included in a database of "Churches and
Denominations"
http://www.crosssearch.com/Churches_and_Denominations/Churches/Churches_by_Location/United_States/Texas/5010.php
and referenced numerous places like "Mission Frontiers" e.g
http://www.missionfrontiers.org/1996/0508/ma9612.htm;
http://www.missionfrontiers.org/1996/0508/ma963.htm
While in Bhutan, I also met someone from SIL who was visiting there and came to
visit the department I was working for and he confirmed to me that the purpose
of
SIL was to enable the spread the gospel in minority languages. Of course this
work also does a huge amount to advance literacy & computing in minority
languages in less developed countries - and SIL deserves a great deal of credit
for this. Very few other organisations are freely contributing this sort of
work
and maybe no one else on the same scale or in quite the same way.
Though the UNDP, IDRC and a number of other NGO's contribute a lot too
and there is the Script Encoding Initiative and numerous Linux i18n & l10n
efforts.
If I was wrong about the motivation of SIL, their patrons or their patrons'
wealth,
I'm happy to stand corrected. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong
with
the motivation I attributed to them - though there is apparently sometimes
some controversy about it's effects (e.g.
http://136.142.158.105/Lasa2000/Hartch.PDF ).
But I guess this is all part of "Globalisation"
With best regards
- Chris
-- Christopher J. Fynn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org> To: "Edward H. Trager" <ehtrager@umich.edu> Cc: "Christopher John Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net>; <unicode@unicode.org> Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 11:37 PM Subject: Re: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ? > On 03/12/2003 14:46, Edward H. Trager wrote: > > >On Wednesday 2003.12.03 19:59:45 -0000, Christopher John Fynn wrote: > > > > > >>>or donate them to a community organization > >>>like SIL (http://www.sil.org/) or Primož Peterlin's FreeFont project > >>>(http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/). > >>> > >>> > >>Ed, SIL is backed by very wealthy Christian evangelists whose purpose is to > >>translate the Bible and other Christian material into every language. Depending > >>on your POV you might consider them to be a community organization" or as some > >>kind of religious imperialists. > >Thanks, Chris, I did not know that. I recently saw some good publicity about the > >author of the Gentium font who I believe works for SIL and that's really all I know > >about them. > I was a member of SIL for ten years but never heard anything about any > "very wealthy Christian evangelists", or saw any of their wealth. One > purpose of SIL is to advance literacy in minority languages, generally > working with governments, universities etc in less developed countries. > Such literacy is of course closely linked to computer support for these > languages' alphabets, hence the involvement in Unicode and with > providing fonts. > Peter Kirk > peter@qaya.org (personal) > peterkirk@qaya.org (work) > http://www.qaya.org/
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