Re: The things one finds

On Fri, 23 Jul 1999, Bryan Maloney wrote:

> I was trying to connect to the "PIR", which is a protein database, but I
> couldn't remember the URL.  Anyway, I put in "http://www.pir.org/", which
> took me someplace completely different.  One of the files on that site
> purports to be a detailed analysis of the Summer Institute of Linguistics
> (one of my favorite online sources).  The URL of that file is
> "http://www.pir.org/gw/sil.txt".  Does anybody know if it's totally
> whacko or if the analysis is on the level?
>
I've not read that paper yet, but when I was doing comparative and
descriptive linguistics in Leyden I was given a book to read by my
teacher that dealt with the SIL, and was quite hostile. I've forgotten
the title, I'm afraid, but I've got some personal experience with their
work, when I had to use it for my MA thesis (there being no chance of
going to Nepal myself).

SIL grammars and lexicons are often of an atrocious quality, and not
seldom written under the influence of Kenneth Pike's tagmemics theory,
which makes them quite incomprehensible. The linguists who work for the
SIL are often not very well trained, they tend to publish late and little
if at all, and the zealous proselytizing of the SIL is single-handedly
responsible for the almost complete ban on linguistic research in Nepal
that held until George van Driem got the Himalaya Languages Project going.

That the SIL motives are not academically kosher is clear, but their
methods are often bad too. Their presence in a village and the way they
go about finding informants can be very disruptive. There seems to have
been a case where a SIL researcher used his teenage son as a native
speaker informant on the grounds that he had stayed with his father in
a certain village a few years during his infancy. The same person has
presented the results of fieldwork done on a very elderly lady who hadn't
been in her village and spoken her mother tongue since she had entered
a leprosy as a child as ground-breaking discoveries. Her command of her
mother tongue had in fact so attrited that it was barely recognizable.

It is important however, to recognize that the SIL works just about
everywhere. Their Asian work is not well regarded, to say the least. The
Africanists I know are rather enthousiastic, and the reactions of the
people I know who've been working on American languages have been mixed.

And, as Ed said, there aren't many academic linguists who actually go
out and describe a language. I think my own alma mater is one of the
most active institutions. They send people out to Indonesia, Irian Jaya,
China, India, the Himalaya's, Africa, the Caucasus and South America.
The university of Lund has a descriptive tradition, but some I know of
a least one very curious grammar produced there - a completely useless
'parametric' description of Seediq, an aboriginal language of Taiwan, that
doesn't even present _one_ text in the language.  I know that Berkeley
sends out quite a few fieldworkers, like David Solnit, who has produced
a beautiful grammar of Kayah Lih (spoken in Birma and Thailand), but most
of their graduates seem to be 'one grammar only' linguists. A lot of the
descriptivists want to 'graduate' to writing theory, comparative lexicons
and so on, after they've done their duty and fathered (or mothered) one
grammar. Dixon's Australia seems to have quite an extensive, if recent,
tradition in describing languages and doing fieldwork.  A lot of Chinese
linguists do good work describing the Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in
South China, but their work is in Chinese, and often quite dubious.

And that's it - at least to my knowledge. No doubt there are other
universities where fieldworkers are being trained, and work is done
on language that are outside my scope, but the number of descriptivists
really pales when compared to the numbers of fastidious theorists who only
work on a portion of English that wouldn't satisfy a slimming model for
a meal if it were food. Compared to that, even the worst SIL description
is mannah from heaven.


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt