rosetta project
:: linux of linguistics
Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next
century, many with little or no significant documentation. As part of the effort to secure this
critical legacy of linguistic diversity, The Long Now Foundation is creating a broad online survey
and near permanent physical archive of 1,000 of the approximately 7,000 languages on the planet.
The project are creating this broad language archive through an open contribution, peer review
model similar to the strategy that created the original Oxford English Dictionary. Their 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.
In the end, they hope the process of creating a new global Rosetta, as well as the imaginative
power of having a 1,000 language archive on a single, aesthetically suggestive object, 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. >from *Rosetta
Project site*
related context
> the worldwide lexicon:
link dictionaries and semantic networks, june 28, 2002
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