Re: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?

From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 20:48:54 EST

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    Peter

    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
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
To: "Edward H. Trager" <ehtrager@umich.edu>
Cc: "Christopher John Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net>; <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 11:37 PM
Subject: Re: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?
> On 03/12/2003 14:46, Edward H. Trager wrote:
>
> >On Wednesday 2003.12.03 19:59:45 -0000, Christopher John Fynn wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>or donate them to a community organization
> >>>like SIL (http://www.sil.org/) or Primož Peterlin's FreeFont project
> >>>(http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/).
> >>>
> >>>
> >>Ed, SIL is backed by very wealthy Christian evangelists whose purpose is to
> >>translate the Bible and other Christian material into every language.
Depending
> >>on your POV you might consider them to be a  community organization" or as
some
> >>kind of religious imperialists.
> >Thanks, Chris, I did not know that.  I recently saw some good publicity
about the
> >author of the Gentium font who I believe works for SIL and that's really all
I know
> >about them.
> I was a member of SIL for ten years but never heard anything about any
> "very wealthy Christian evangelists", or saw any of their wealth. One
> purpose of SIL is to advance literacy in minority languages, generally
> working with governments, universities etc in less developed countries.
> Such literacy is of course closely linked to computer support for these
> languages' alphabets, hence the involvement in Unicode and with
> providing fonts.
> Peter Kirk
> peter@qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>

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