Fwd: ST-L: Fw: Call for contributions to new 1,000 Language Online Archive

[Wladimir Fischer]

Forwarded from LINGUIST list (http://www.linguistlist.org)
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Announcing the launch of The Rosetta Project 1,000 Language Online
Archive at http://www.RosettaProject.org

Call for text contribution and review comments.

The Rosetta Project is an attempt to create a broad corpus of language
descriptions, vernacular texts, analytic materials and audio files for 1,000
languages in a publicly accessible, online archive as well as on various
extreme term storage media.  The intention is to create a meaningful
survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages as well as a
unique platform for contemporary comparative linguistic research and
education.  For each language, we are collecting seven
descriptive/analytic components.

- Detailed descriptions
- Glossed vernacular texts
- Orthographies
- Swadesh 100 word vocabulary lists
- Inventories of phonemes
- Morphology and Syntax sketches
- Translations of Genesis Ch 1-3
- Audio files with transcriptions

We are creating this broad language archive through an open
contribution, open review process, similar to the strategy that created
the Oxford English Dictionary.  Though in this case, we hope the
Internet speeds the process a little bit. . . ;-)  And to help the process
along, we are initiating collection efforts at Stanford Berkeley, Yale and
SIL, as well as collaborations with various scholars of comparative and
historical linguistics.

As this is an open source project (a Linux of Linguistics), we need your
help.  We call on all language specialists, whether linguist,
anthropologist, translator or interested native speaker, to contribute
texts or provide review comments in their languages of expertise.  To
enable this collaboration, we have created an elaborate online working
environment at www.rosettaproject.org, offering access to all the texts in
our database, as well as providing various tools for text review,
annotation and discussion.

To clarify, this project is not an attempt to orchestrate massive new
research on lesser documented languages.  Rather, our intention is to
develop a powerful, well tended platform to collect, preserve and make
available the many riches of already completed descriptive linguistic
work- work that is often difficult to access or rotting away in
underfunded archives or in the file cabinets of our aging colleagues.
We are starting with the above descriptive frame for each language, but
hope to expand the list as new datasets or texts appear that need an
online home.  We have created the navigation and search environment.
It is now yours to fill what that which interests you.

In the end, we hope this worldwide collaboration to create a new global
"Rosetta Stone" will help draw attention to the tragedy of language
extinction as well as speed the work to preserve what we have left of this
critical manifestation of the human intellect.

Please visit us at http://www.rosettaproject.org.  We expect you will be
pleased with what you find and hope you will join us for this very
ambitious new initiative.

Jim Mason
Director, The Rosetta Project
Long Now Foundation
http://www.longnow.org

--

Wladimir Fischer

Spengergasse 52/12
A-1050 Wien

++43-1-5968567 (phone)
++43-699-11332058 (mob)
++49-89-1488-219546 (fax)

wlado at gmx.at

http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a8902625

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