The Rosetta Project: Rescuing languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

The Rosetta Project: Rescuing languages
-Posted by Dan Farber @ 12:22 pm
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1443

Language and culture are inseparable. An estimated 7,000 languages, and
the associated social and cultural artifacts that accompany them, exist
today, but many are on the verge of extinction.

"There is a level of endangerment to the survival of languages, driven
primarily by globalization," said counterculture icon Stewart Brand.
"In this century, 50 to 90 percent of the languages will evaporate
under the current circumstance."

In a conversation at the Future in Review conference with Larry
Brilliant of the Seva Foundation, Brand outlined the Rosetta Project ,
which is dedicated to archiving all the languages of the world online
and creating tools to help recover and revitalize languages.

"We are using the Internet to alleviate the effects of globalization and
the homogenization of culture on languages," Brand said. So far, the
Rosetta Project has documented 4,000 languages and about are 2,500
currently archived online, Brand said.

[photo inset - Larry Brilliant (left) and Steward Brand]

The project is somewhat analogous to Wikipedia in that thousands of
volunteers (about 2,300 today) peer review the content and contribute
to the corpus. In fact, the Rosetta Project states its goal as becoming
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."

Each language in the archive includes detail descriptions, maps,
numbers, orthography, phonology, grammar, audio files, a translation of
part of the biblical Genesis text, and Swadesh word lists. The archive
also includes comparative lists of common words.

Archiving the world’s languages and trying to preserve or even recover
their use is swimming upstream. Mandarin, Hindi and English are the
leading languages in terms of native speakers. Brilliant pointed out
that their are more English speakers (not all fluent) in China than in
the U.S.

At the other end of the spectrum, less than 10 million people in and
around New Guinea speak an estimated 900 native languages. The
flattening world (see Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat) leans over time
toward monoculture and a few dominant  languages for global
communications and commerce. Nonetheless, Brand points out that
successive generations want to connect with their roots and cultural
heritage.

The Rosetta Project achive and tools will help preserve that
opportunity, but don’t expect to see a lot of instant messages in
Arauan, Chapacura-Wanham, Choco, East Papuan, Geelvink Bay, Huavean,
Kiowa Tanoan, Luwic, Mascoian, Wakashan, Yenisei Ostyak, Yukaghir or
Zamucoan languages