Re: SIL (was: A project)

Jesse Bangs wrote:
>> D.  At least in the olden days, SIL was wedded to Kenneth Pike's
>> Tagmemic theory, resulting in a lot of their publications being
>> incomprehensible to present-day linguists.
>
>What in the world is Tagmemic theory?
My point exactly :-).  Essentially it arose out of Bloomfieldian
structuralism, but with Pike's unique twists.  Beyond that, deponent saith
not;  I am a rare product of that era at Michigan, who never took a course
with Pike.  To be fair, early transformational grammars of this-or-that
language, based on a "Syntactic Structures" model, or even an "Aspects"
model,  probably now stike us as equally quaint.
>
>> To be fair, I've seen
>> fairly recent work that is more up-to-date, but still idiosyncratic.
>>  They tend to be good at old-fashioned phonemics with a hint of
>> generativism; don't know about OT.
>
>Isn't this good for what they're trying to do, though?  Their job is to
>document and translate previously unrecorded (or poorly recorded)
>languages, and phonemics is a good way to give a base description which
>future theorists can tear apart at will.  It seems to me that giving a
>broad, comprehensive description of a language will be a lot easier with
>the well-established (if slightly outdated) theories of phonemics than
>with the uncertain, changeable theories of OT.

Absolutely, yes.