| | | Founded by Cameron Townsend and fellow evangelical missionaries, SIL produced one of the leading academic linguists of the 20th century, Professor Pike, and masses of globally respected fieldwork on the extremely complex "real world" of human language. Townsend's great enthusiasm for bilingual education in the Caucasus under the Soviet regime is just one other example of where it would be wrong to assume unthinking and inept right wing fundamentalist urges preventing either creativity and rigor in SIL.
Though with the benefit of hindsight Townsend may have been a little naive in the case of the Soviet regime's priorities, his passion for the rights of minority ethnic and language groups throughout the world have fired many other idealists since.
The SIL site was once pointed to by kb to answer a question of mine about the Basque language. It was cool to end up there for the first time because of Keith, having been impacted quite substantially by the teaching of SIL and the work of the sister Wycliffe Bible Translators 20 years or more before. But what year, wiki and page was that I wonder?
www.sil.org I assume it is.
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