Linguistic Project

What will archeologists and linguists use in future millennia to unlock the secret scribblings we make when English has vanished from the earth? The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible archive of all documented human languages. Why worry? The project explains that "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 of the work that has been done, especially on smaller languages, remains hidden away in personal research files or poorly preserved in under-funded archives."

The project has several tools you can use already. Its All Language Archive produced this result for basic English. I had no idea English, in its many flavors, is the language of so many countries. Another surprise was the common text used in the Comparative Word List Generator: translations of Genesis Chapters 1-3 as Biblical texts are the most widely and carefully translated writings on the planet, they say. The project plans to make material available in three media: online, in a huge reference book, and on micro-etched (analog) discs.

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