William Cameron Townsend

William Cameron Townsend - Introduction

"Not since the third century has there been a man like Cameron Townsend who attempted so much, and saw so many dreams realized in his lifetime," declared Kenneth L. Pike, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Pike called them "dreams" but they were more on the order of hard-nosed intentions. One objective was to stimulate the study of every single minority language in the world not yet analyzed or recorded. Another was to enable every people, wherever they were, to establish and control their own communal identities. Townsend saw tremendous progress toward accomplishing both goals in his lifetime. What follows is only a keyhole glimpse into the story.

As for the first "dream," the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which Townsend founded, published academic materials describing and analyzing 1,724 languages in the last half of the twentieth century alone. As for the second — which to Townsend was equally as important as the first — he, with his colleagues, worked vigorously with appropriate local governmental and educational agencies to help all these peoples acquire self-esteem, dignity, and national identity.

Townsend contributed much to the academic community and encouraged members of small ethnic groups to re-evaluate the immeasurable value of their cultural identity.

Townsend's life was as diverse as the programs he advanced and the organizations he founded. For instance, he insisted that members of SIL should be ready to serve others scientifically, materially, and spiritually. From early in his career, Townsend was personally committed to each of these three areas of involvement. It is not sufficient, he argued, that a person should be interested in serving people unless he has that scientific preparation which will make his contribution relevant and effective. He contended that effective service requires both scientific investigation and a thorough understanding of the people.

Of special importance, he maintained, is a careful study of a people's language and, by means of that language, an acquired insight into their aspirations and goals. But a scientific study in which the investigator is interested merely in amassing data about the people studied and not in helping them reach worthy goals may have some value to the scientific world, but it will have ignored human values. Townsend affirmed that scientific knowledge should be used as a means for offering people the resource of choice for bettering their daily lives.

Crucial to a well-rounded program for minority-language groups, Townsend believed, is the spiritual component. Natural religion, defined as man's seeking for an integrated explanation of his life and world, indicates that all people have deep, unfulfilled spiritual needs. An adequate effort to serve minority-language communities, he believed, must take into account this spiritual dimension. It may not be fitting for some individuals or for a government to be involved in such matters, but for a private organization it is appropriate. It can devote itself to the tasks of scientific investigation and, at the same time, to practical service and to spiritual orientation. This three-phased objective molded Townsend's career.

Townsend was born in California in 1896. When he was 21 and studying at Occidental College, he felt the need for getting involved in spiritual work among Central American people. Choosing as his touchstone the greatest document of Western culture, the Bible (the basis of his own spiritual orientation), Townsend went to Central America to make this historic volume available to the people there. As he mingled with the large indigenous population, he saw the need for work along scientific and practical lines in addition to the spiritual. Accordingly, he and his wife Elvira settled among the Kaqchikel of Guatemala. They applied themselves vigorously to the task of learning this unwritten language. In 1926, Townsend made a structural analysis of the Kaqchikel verb system and became one of the first men in the world to succeed in analyzing a complicated vernacular language system in reference to its own structure. Before him, most who had attempted to analyze indigenous American languages had, because of their European background, tried to force their analyses into the Latin mold. Townsend's work was commended by the late Professor Edward Sapir, one of the world's great linguists, who taught that every language should be described in terms of its own structure. Some of Townsend's work on the Kaqchikel verb system was published under the title "Comparaciones Morfológicas entre Cakchiquel y Náhuatl" in Investigaciones Lingüísticas (1937, no.4).

In order to publish these primer materials, Townsend started a small printing establishment. To teach reading, he instituted literacy campaigns for adults as well as for children in cooperation with local educators. He founded several schools for indigenous children, was instrumental in setting up a small medical clinic and a coffee cooperative, helped construct small dams for irrigation, and introduced improved seed and farming methods.

As for the spiritual phase of the work, Townsend and gifted Kaqchikel co-translators laboriously translated the New Testament into the Kaqchikel language. As small study groups developed, they found in the pages of the translated New Testament a counterbalance to the encroaching industrial world with its inevitable secularism.

It was during the second decade of this kind of work, in 1931, that the outstanding Mexican educator, Professor Moisés Sáenz, providentially learned of Townsend's three-phased program while traveling in Guatemala. He visited the schools Townsend had founded, talked with the children and parents, saw with favor the positive impact upon the culture, and invited Townsend to Mexico to do the same kind of work there.

That autumn (1935) Townsend and his wife, Elvira, with several of the students went to Mexico to undertake their new work. The Townsends settled in a tiny Aztec (Náhuatl) village, a two-hour mountain drive from Mexico City. In addition to the enthusiastic support of Prof. Moisés Sáenz, Dr. Mariano Silva y Aceves (formerly Rector of the National University of Mexico and then Director of the Mexican Institute of Linguistic Investigation) encouraged Townsend in the academic phases of the program. The Secretary of Labor, Lic. Genaro Vásquez — intensely interested in a cultural program for the indigenous community — had his department publish Townsend's primers for teaching Aztecs to read.

With this encouragement, the Townsends recruited more young people in the United States and returned to Mexico the following fall (1936) with a larger group of students. In pairs, the students scattered to isolated areas of Mexico to start the prodigious task of learning hitherto unwritten languages. Meanwhile, in the tiny Aztec village of Tetelcingo where the Townsends worked, the program of practical help was broadened to include planting an orange grove and adding women's sewing classes to the government's elementary school in the village. All was carried forward with the cooperation of Cárdenas-prompted government officials.

Townsend had a deep respect for the people among whom he worked in Latin America for over 60 years. He enjoyed being with them and listening to their perspectives. Almost from the start he had friends from all strata of society: he knew 42 heads of state, scores of cabinet members, scientists, educators, wealthy, poor, Catholics, Evangelicals, Communists. He loved and sought to serve them all.

After a six-week survey of the topography by air and by river, Townsend and his colleagues set about solving the enormous logistical problems posed by this vast jungle. First, a centrally located supply hub had to be carved out of the jungle. They settled on the shoreline of a lake named Yarinacocha. It would also serve as an ethnolinguistic study center. At first, the problems seemed insurmountable, but help began to come from friends in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. To solve the problem of transport, civic groups and friends donated small float planes so the linguists could be flown to remote villages. Most notable was the gift of a twin-engine Catalina flying boat, the Moisés Sáenz, a gift of Mexican friends to the Peruvian government for the work of SIL. For twenty years this amphibious plane, honoring the Mexican educator who invited Townsend to Mexico, flew thousands of miles in Peru's Amazonia.

As results from the linguistic studies became available, the Peruvian government, at Townsend's suggestion, set up a specialized school at Yarinacocha to train gifted local community members as teachers. They would teach basic education first in their native languages and, progressively, in Spanish. Small, single-engine float planes and the Moisés Sáenz were used to bring teaching candidates to Yarinacocha from widely scattered and isolated streams of the jungle. A bridge to the vernacular languages was supplied by SIL linguists who supplemented the instruction by translating difficult parts of the lectures and some text materials into those languages to ensure comprehension. Once the students were trained, the government — through its specially created bilingual education system — appointed them to be official salaried school teachers in their villages.

The growing numbers of SIL linguistic and support personnel enabled SIL to expand its work into many countries. The three students in Townsend’s first SIL term expanded into a current SIL staff of thousands of members from dozens of home countries. SIL consultants work alongside more than 1,500 local communities worldwide, usually at the invitation of the government, a university, or a minority-language community and often under the terms of a cooperative cultural contract.

Included in the SIL Language and Culture Archives are three significant items that reflect a fulfillment of Townsend's lifelong intention of reconstructing language families. The first is a University of Pennsylvania dissertation by SIL’s Dr. Robert Longacre on Proto-Mixtecan. One reviewer said this "belongs to the class composed of Bloomfield's Algonquian and perhaps nothing else." The second is Dr. Sarah Gudchinsky's dissertation on the reconstruction of Proto-Popotecan, the parent language of both the Mixtecan and Popolocan language families of Mexico. The third, a University of Pennsylvania dissertation by Dr. Calvin Rensch on Proto-Otomanguean, is thought to be a milestone in the science of comparative linguistics.

One who was mentored by Townsend was Dr. Richard S. Pittman. In 1951, continuing Townsend's vision, he published a modest catalog of the world's languages. Now an online catalog of over 7,000 languages, the Ethnologue brings together the best information available on those languages including detailed data such as their location, number of speakers, and variant names. This authoritative language resource is consulted by thousands every day, including partner organizations and other non-profits, government agencies, companies, and students.

Townsend was an extraordinary combination of the idealist and the down-to-earth social worker—a mixture that sometimes amazed his friends and confounded his opponents. He was successful according to his declared purposes and those achievements brought him international acclaim. This success he attributed not to himself but to the power of God to whom he constantly looked for strength when he was overwhelmed by the needs he saw.