Rosetta Project is creating an online collection and an optical disc of writings in different languages. The disc version can be held in the palm of a hand. But it contains 13,000 pages representing 1,500 languages. The Long Now Foundation, a non-profit group, launched the Rosetta Project. Alexander Rose is the Executive Director.
“A single parallel text, a description, a map of where it’s from, these types of things that just give you enough that you can compare to another language that you know or have studied or scholars have figured out, you can start pulling parallels between the two and reconstruct the basics of a language.”
The Smithsonian Institution recently organized a demonstration of endangered languages at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington. Crowds heard examples of Hawaiian and other disappearing languages like Tuvan, which can still be heard in southern Siberia.
Many languages are spoken by small groups, says Rosetta Project director Laura Welcher.
“They’re spoken by thousands of people or even smaller-sized groups and a lot of those languages are in remote parts of the world. They haven’t been well documented.”
Linguists at universities and research centers are in a race against time to record these languages before all speakers are gone.
“The idea is to purposely create a massively parallel collection that is broadly representative of all our human languages, that can be that kind of secret decoder ring for human languages and what we leave for the future.”
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25