Re: Summer of SIL

Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

> I had kind of assumed that the Summer Institute of Linguistics was named
> after somebody called "Summer", but the other day a ran across it
> translated into Swedish as _Lingvistiska sommarinstitutet_, featuring
> the Swedish noun _sommar_ "summer". Is this translation is official or
> at least correct, and if yes, why did they name the thing after the season?
SIL was originally a program designed to train missionaries in
basic skills of linguistics so that they could make accurate Bible
translations, and IIRC was originally intended as a summer-long
course before the missionaries left for the field.  I don't know
whether this is still the case; I know they do some theoretical
work now.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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