Since its launch in 2005, Google Earth has become a valuable tool for sharing information of global scale. Its accessible platform and wide distribution has led to a wealth of independently created “layers” exploring a huge variety of topics.

The Rosetta archive is by design an explicitly global collection, and by nature relevant to every human occupied corner of the world. With its own global focus, Google Earth makes an ideal showcase for our data. To explore this we’ve created pilot layers that bring out some of the cool ways we see our language data interacting with the Google Earth interface. At the moment the layers bring just snippets of our archive to the surface, and we’re excited to bring the full depth of our materials to bear in future collections.

The files highlight some of the most intriguing aspects of the Rosetta database. You can browse endangered languages of Africa and the Americas, listen to recordings, and explore our 3D representation of linguistic diversity in the urban centers of the U.S. west coast. Check the files out here.

As this is a pilot project, we look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions, and we’d love to hear ideas for future implementations.

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During its recent gravity assist flyby, the Rosetta craft was mistaken for an Earth-threatening asteroid! From Sky and Telescope:

“The spacecraft was unknowingly ‘discovered’ on November 7th by astronomers in Arizona scanning the skies for Earth-threatening asteroids. They dutifully reported the 20th-magnitude blip in their images to the Minor Planet Center here in Cambridge, and the next day the MPC announced that the newfound object, now designated 2007 VN84, would have a close brush with Earth…

An observant Russian skygazer named Denis Denisenko was the first to point out that 2007 VN84 was, in fact, Rosetta. The connection had been missed apparently because no one from the European Space Agency had bothered to update the MPC as to Rosetta’s recent whereabouts. And so on November 9th the Cambridge clearinghouse issued an Editorial Notice to declare that ‘The minor planet 2007 VN84 does not exist and the designation is to be retired.’”

Well, maybe we’ll keep the designation around… to refer to Rosetta’s 15 minutes of minor planetary fame!

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Get out your telescopes!

From www.spaceweather.com:

“Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is rapidly approaching Earth for a close flyby on Nov. 13th. The gravity assist maneuver, bringing the probe only 5301 km above the Pacific Ocean, will fling Rosetta toward its 10-year destination: Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Amateur astronomers with mid-sized backyard telescopes and CCD cameras can observe the approach; Rosetta is a 18th magnitude speck of light in the constellation Lynx: ephemeris.”

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This week, tech sites like DomainInformer reported that ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was unveiling the internationalization of top-level domain names in “11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, and Tamil.” Uh…wait a second…did they say Yiddish?!! A language with around 3 million speakers in the company of languages like Hindi, which has an estimated 500 million speakers, and Mandarin, with about 1 billion? Well, all we can say here at Rosetta is…how cool! It’s not every day that a minority language gets as much attention as the big shots.

Before getting too excited though, we should probably note that what’s actually being counting here is scripts…writing systems…rather than languages per se. This is why Chinese makes the list twice: for the simplified as well as traditional writing system. If we were counting languages, “Chinese” would include a lot more – since linguistically speaking, Mandarin is one of many Chinese languages.

The reason for listing Yiddish, a language closely related to German, rather than the more obvious Hebrew, a Semitic language and national language of the State of Israel, is that although both use roughly the same script, Yiddish requires the use of few additional diacritics. What works for Yiddish, should therefore work for Hebrew as well, although ICANN is certainly open to discussion of this topic on the IDNwiki.

This internationalization effort is certainly good news for speakers and typers of Yiddish worldwide, as well as the hundreds of millions of people who regularly use non-Roman scripts online, and who will now be able to have top-level domain names (.com, .gov, etc.) written in the same script as the rest of the domain.

Now about that http…

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The New York Times reported yesterday on the crisis of language loss, and the work of linguists to document languages that are on the brink of vanishing without a trace. This picture of linguists David Harrison and Greg Anderson, and Charlie Muldunga, the only known speaker of Amurdag (a language of the Northern Territory previously thought to be extinct), shows that the tools of this enterprise are quite simple and inexpensive: an audio or video recorder and good ol’ paper and pencil. With the right training, even short periods of work between linguists and speakers can yield a wealth of valuable documentation.

In the past, linguistic documentation like the kind being made here was distilled into scientific publications that illustrated unique features of a language, or that supported or disproved particular theories of grammatical structure. Now, with heightened awareness of the impending loss of global linguistic diversity, language minority researchers and advocates are realizing the tremendous value of this documentation itself. It can be used by many people, for many different purposes – by scientists interested in the grammatical or typological properties of language, to communities whose heritage culture is represented and embodied by these languages. With enough interest, motivation and effort, this documentation can even provide the seeds of language revitalization, where communities reinvigorate a language and bring it back into active use.

But there is another concern: these incredible resources can become endangered themselves – mouldering on dusty shelves, forgotten in people’s attics or garages, until daughters or grandsons find them and not knowing their value, sweep them into the dustbin. Even digital documentation is at risk, if not from lapsing into similar obscurity, then sinking into a digital format obsolescence that renders them practically unrecoverable. A growing number of archives and digital efforts like The Rosetta Project are working to prevent this from happening, by providing format conversion, safe storage, and most importantly public access. In the end, it is people knowing and caring about these languages that will help bring them back from the brink.

Note: It turns out we can’t link to the Amurdag language in The Rosetta Project, since its not on the books, so to speak. It was previously thought to be extinct until this single speaker Charlie Muldunga was found. Yeah — oops! But this turns out to be a known phenomena in Australia, and has to do with ideas of multilingualism, language identity, and who can claim to be a speaker of a language.

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This is a great appendix I just came across on the half life of vocabulary in a language. From the text:

The rate of vocabulary change The half-life of a word is the amount of time required for there to be a 50% chance that it will be replaced by a new word. Most words have a half-life of 2,000 years. However, a small number of words have a half-life of greater than 10,000 years. This shows that despite the fast average pace of language evolution, some meanings, like highly-conserved genes, evolve at a slow rate. The y axis in the graphic is the number out of a sample of 200 meanings. (ref. 1)

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San Bushman in Namibia. Linguists say the ‘click’ sound used in San speech may have been a feature of the proto-language. (Joy Tessman/NGI/GI)

“Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one

A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.”

Nice article (CS Monitor) forwarded to me by Paul Saffo on the search for a single proto-language from which all others came. In the last seven years of the Rosetta Project our data has been used by linguists to try and prove out this theory including the work at Sante Fe Institute mentioned in the article.

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I recently came across this very nice animation of the last 2907 years of alphabet evolution. It is a remarkably condensing and simple animated illustration.

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I recently came across this stunningly good linguistics article published in the New Yorker (April of 02007). While I am certain that folks working on our Rosetta Project will have varying opinions on the work being described in the article, I found it an excellent primer into the world of endangered language and field linguistics.

The story is about trying to crack the language of the Pirahã, a tribe in South America, whos language and culture arguably defies almost all linguistic and behavioral convention. The story twists and turns through academia, Chomsky, the Amazon, missionary groups, bible translators, and the 25 year relationship of one field linguist with this exceptional tribe.

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On January 2nd of 02007 Stewart Brand and I stepped into the cool deep past and unknown future of who begat who.

(picture: the granite genealogical vaults)

Since I began working on the 10,000 Year Clock project, and associated Library projects here at Long Now almost a decade ago, I have heard cryptic references to this archive. We have visited the nuclear waste repositories, historical sites, and many other long term structures to look for inspiration. However we had never found a way to see this facility. This is the underground bunker where the Mormons keep their genealogical backup data, deep in the solid granite cliffs of Little Cottonwood Canyon, outside Salt Lake City. UT.

The Church has been collecting genealogical data from all the sources it can get its hands on, from all over the world, for over 100 years. They have become the largest such repository, and the data itself is open to anyone who uses their website, or comes to their buildings in downtown Salt Lake City.

However they dont do public tours of the Granite Vaults where all the original microfilm is kept for security and preservation reasons. Since Stewart had recently given a talk at Brigam Young University we were able to request access, and the Church graciously took us out to lunch and gave us a tour.

(more…)

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