The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek...

 to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation

Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996, is a private organization that seeks to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. It aims to provide a counterpoint to what it views as today's "faster/cheaper" mindset and to promote "slower/better" thinking...

. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s. 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

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

 are increasing the prevalence of English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 and other major languages. The intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic

Comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....

 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

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

. The resulting archive will be publicly available in three different media: a micro-etched nickel

Nickel

Nickel is a chemical element with the chemical symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel belongs to the transition metals and is hard and ductile...

 alloy

Alloy

An alloy is a mixture or metallic solid solution composed of two or more elements. Complete solid solution alloys give single solid phase microstructure, while partial solutions give two or more phases that may or may not be homogeneous in distribution, depending on thermal history...

 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 linguistic description, especially the description of languages with few speakers, 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 plans a broad online survey and near-permanent physical archive of 1,500 of the approximately 7,000 human languages.

The project has three overlapping goals:

1. to create an unprecedented platform for comparative linguistic research and education
2. to develop and widely distribute a functional linguistic tool that might help with the recovery of lost or compromised languages in unknown futures
3. 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 1,500-language corpus

Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...

 expands on the parallel-text structure of the original Rosetta Stone through archiving ten descriptive components for each of the 1,500 selected languages.

The goal is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 "Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

" — 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

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, Yale

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, the American Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

, and the American Summer Institute of Linguistics (and its offices in Dallas

Dallas, Texas

Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...

).

The resulting Rosetta archives will be publicly available in three different media:

1. a free and continually growing online archive
2. a single-volume monumental reference book
3. an extreme-longevity micro-etched disc

Plans envisage the global distribution of 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 on November 3, 2008. The disc contains over 13,000 pages of language documentation, which can be read after magnifying by 650 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.

See also

• All Species Foundation
  All Species Foundation
  The All Species Foundation aimed to catalog all species on Earth by 2025. It began in 2001 as a spinoff of the Long Now Foundation.The Foundation started with a large grant from the Schlinger Foundation but because of the stock market crash of 2000, at least in part, it was unable to attract...
  
  , another project of the foundation
• Intercontinental Dictionary Series
  Intercontinental Dictionary Series
  The Intercontinental Dictionary Series is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Mary Ritchie Key of the University of California, Irvine is the...
  
  
• Endangered language
  Endangered language
  An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
  
  
• Language death
  Language death
  In linguistics, language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety...
  
  
• Language revitalization
• Time capsule
  Time capsule
  A time capsule is an historic cache of goods or information, usually intended as a method of communication with future people and to help future archaeologists, anthropologists, or historians...
  
  

External links

• Rosetta Project homepage
• Dan Farber, "The Rosetta Project: Rescuing languages", ZDNet
  ZDNet
  ZDNet is a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive, along with TechRepublic and SmartPlanet. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991 as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication owned by CNET...
  
  May 25, 2005