Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12000; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages. Some of these languages have fewer than one thousand speakers left in the world. Others are considered to be dying out because government centralization and globalization are increasing the prevalence of English and other major languages. The intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic research and education, as well as a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery or revitalisation of lost languages in the future.

The Project is creating this broad language archive through an open contribution, open review process similar to the strategy that created the original Oxford English Dictionary. The resulting archive will be publicly available in three different media: a micro-etched nickel alloy disc three inches (7.62 cm) across with 2,000 year life expectancy; a single volume monumental reference book; and a growing online archive.

Concept

Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation. Much of the work that has been done, especially on smaller languages, remains hidden away in personal research files or poorly preserved in under-funded archives.

As part of the effort to secure this critical legacy of linguistic diversity, the Long Now Foundation is creating a broad online survey and near-permanent physical archive of 1,000 of the approximately 7,000 languages on the planet.

There are three overlapping goals for the project:
*To create an unprecedented platform for comparative linguistic research and education.
*To develop and widely distribute a functional linguistic tool that might help with the recovery of lost or compromised languages in unknown futures.
*To offer an aesthetic object that suggests the immense diversity of human languages as well as the very real threats to the continued survival of this diversity.

The 1,000-language corpus expands on the parallel text structure of the original Rosetta Stone through archiving ten descriptive components for each of the 1,000 selected languages.

The goal is an open source "Linux of Linguistics" — an effort of collaborative online scholarship drawing on the expertise and contributions of thousands of academic specialists and native speakers around the world. The project is also organising formal archive research groups at Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, the American Library of Congress, and the American Summer Institute of Linguistics (and its offices in Dallas).

The resulting Rosetta archive will be publicly available in three different media: a free and continually growing online archive, a single volume monumental reference book, and an extreme-longevity micro-etched disc. The plans are to globally distribute significant numbers of these discs with protective containers to individuals, institutions and others who care to keep one.

A "Version 1.0" of the disc was completed in the Autumn of 2002. The disc contains over 15,000 pages of language documentation, which can be read after magnifying by 1000 times with a microscope. A mass-production version of the disk is planned, but not currently in production. The online library, however, continues to grow.

ee also

* All Species Foundation, another project of the foundation

External links

* [http://www.rosettaproject.org/ Rosetta Project homepage]
* Dan Farber, [http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1443 "The Rosetta Project: Rescuing languages"] , ZDNet.com, May 25, 2005