PeterThank you, Chris. This is a fair summary of the work of SIL. See also http://www.sil.org/sil/history.htm and the rest of the www.sil.org site.
My message to Edward was off-line and he mistakenly replied to the list. 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.
While in Bhutan, I met someone from SIL who was visiting there and came to visit the department I was working for and he confirmed to me that a 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 that. Very few other organisations are freely contributing in the same way and probably no one on the same scale.
If I'm wrong about the motivation of SIL or their patrons, I'm happy to stand corrected. Not that there is anything wrong with the motivation I attributed to them.
With best regards
- Chris -- Christopher J. Fynn
As far as the "very wealthy Christian Evangelists" are concerned, there are a lot of stories going around the Internet, some but not necessarily all spread by conspiracy theory nuts and/or by those with a clear anti-Christian agenda. I'm sure there is some truth there, and also a lot of exaggeration and faulty logic. For example, some of the arguments I have seen take a fact that A and B once had a meeting together as implying that A is the chief financial backer and secret controller of B's organisation.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
