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Re: Summer of SIL

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Thursday, December 19, 2002, 18:09
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. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637