Rosetta Project - Concept

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 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 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 "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 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. As of 2011 a mass-production version of the disk is planned, but not currently in production. The online library, however, continues to grow.