Rosetta Project Director Laura Welcher recently took part in a segment on The History Channel’s Life After People series.

In an episode titled “Crypt of Civilization,” Laura discusses the Rosetta Disk and The 10,000 Year Clock.   

The central question of the series is “How long would it last?” The series explores various materials, systems and structures built by humans to determine their durability sans maintenance as well as natural systems and how they might flourish or decline without human intervention.

“Crypt of Civilization” focuses on time capsules, vaults and other attempts to create long-lasting caches of materials or data.  Laura explores some of the unique challenges in designing artifacts like the Disk and Clock to last thousands of years while the show’s producers vividly illustrate them.

You can watch the series on its website (though the “Crypt of Civilization” episode isn’t available yet).

Dedicated to bringing together video documentation of the daily lives of disparate global citizens, the Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  This installation is sponsored by the Long Now Foundation through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Global Lives Project’s World Premiere installation will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 26 – June 20, 2010! The exhibit is part of an artist residency that will evolve over four months. We will be showing, for the first time ever, our series of ten 24-hour videos of daily life from around the planet.

Join Global Lives, Long Now and the YBCA for the opening night celebration on February 26th from 7:30pm to 11:30pm.  There will be a cash bar and music from San Franciscans Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima, and Tinker.  Global Lives producers and directors will be there to discuss the project.

The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in!

This week, the New York Times ran an article about a recent scientific discovery in the predator alert calls of Campbell’s monkeys.   Strikingly, they seem to have the ability to create complex calls out of multiple elements – a “morphological” (word building) process previously thought to only take place in human language.

Human languages do this all the time – for example the word ‘walked’ is built of two morphemes, one carrying the main verbal action ‘walk’ and the other marking past tense ‘-ed’.  In the case of the Campbell’s monkey, morphemes are often combined to indicate different types of threats.  Previous observations of monkeys have shown that they sometimes use different types of calls for different types of predators, but what’s unique about these calls is that some of them can be combined with other calls to change their meaning.  So, instead of just having a “jaguar!” call and an “eagle!” call as has been observed in Vervet monkeys, Campbell’s monkeys have a “leopard!” call that can be combined with a suffix that changes its meaning to indicate a less specific threat:

Crucially, “krak” calls were exclusively given after detecting a leopard, suggesting that it functioned as a leopard alarm call, whereas the “krak-oo” was given to almost any disturbance, suggesting it functioned as a general alert call. Similarly, “hok” calls were almost exclusively associated with the presence of a crowned eagle (either a real eagle attack or in response to another monkey’s eagle alarm calls), while “hok-oo” calls were given to a range of disturbances within the canopy, including the presence of an eagle or a neighbouring group (whose presence could sometimes be inferred by the vocal behaviour of the females).

- Ouattara, Lemasson & Zuberbühler

Just as artificial intelligence researchers have been busy over the last several decades celebrating each previously-unique human capacity achieved by computers, biologists have been finding behaviors once thought to mark the uniqueness of humans in other animals.  Neurobiologist and primatologist Robert Sapolski recently gave a lecture at Stanford about the uniqueness of humans, which provides a great overview of what we share and don’t share with other animals (as is currently understood).

Similarly, primatologist Frans de Waal has made a career of describing the political, cultural, emotional and moral lives of primates.  His work has illustrated the evolutionary breadth and depth of many human characteristics previously thought to be recent behavioral innovations without precedent and unique to our species.

As artificial intelligence research looks forward to recreating human capabilities it focuses our efforts to understand those capabilities.  Similarly, in identifying in other animals capacities like syntax once thought to be unique to humans, we are afforded a clearer look back on the deep history and development of those capacities.  Looked at this way, it actually did take millions of years to produce the works of Shakespeare.

Earlier this month, a small group of World War II Navajo Code Talkers – who are today in their eighties and nineties – marched as a group for the first time in the New York City Veteran’s Day Parade as a way to raise awareness in the US about their wartime contribution. The Code Talkers were Navajo speakers recruited by the U.S Military for sending coded verbal messages by radio in World War II – an effort legendary today as producing “the only unbroken code in modern military history.”

This caught my attention partly because Navajo is a threatened language – while there are 150,000 speakers at last count and several thousand monolinguals, the word on the wire is that Navajo is losing ground to English among the youngest in the Navajo community – and children are, after all, the ones who decide a language’s fate.

I also had this question in the back of my mind – could a human language be used in such a way today?   Granted, we have sophisticated computer encryption that pretty much renders any human generated code obsolete.  But say for a moment that we didn’t, or couldn’t use digital technology…  do we simply know too much about what is possible in human language?  And failing that, is there any language out there esoteric and isolated enough that it could be put to such use?

First, to clarify, there is nothing inherent about the Navajo language that made the code uncrackable – a quick perusal of the recent press turns up descriptors like “ancient language” and “complex grammar” which could apply to any human language.  The phrase “near isolate” also doesn’t make sense because Navajo is a language with many linguistic relatives in the Athabaskan group throughout the Southwestern US, Canada, and Alaska.

What made the code uncrackable at the time was a combination of factors – physical and social isolation of the Navajo speech community certainly did, as few non-Navajos spoke the language.  Also, little was known linguistically about the language at the time, and linguistics outside of philology was itself a fledgling field of study. Most importantly, the code wasn’t just everyday Navajo, but a cipher based on Navajo with word-replacements like “tortoise” for tank or “iron fish” for submarine as well as Navajo substitutions for English military acronyms. A Navajo speaker was in fact captured and tortured for his knowledge at Bataan, but since he didn’t know the cipher, he was just as befuddled as everyone else.

I wonder though whether a linguist today with a basic knowledge of the language, and/or access to basic tools like a grammar and dictionary, transported back to that time might have figured it out, given enough data and the context in which the messages were delivered.   A relatively few cracked messages could render the essential cryptographic key. Do all human languages have such basic description?  Far from it.  My best guess based on what we’ve been able to find for The Rosetta Project is maybe one half of all human languages?  A third? Without this, the decryption task would have to encompass basic linguistic analysis as well.

So is it possible that a human language in this day and age could serve the purpose?  Maybe, maybe not — I welcome discussion.  But if not – and here’s the real question on my mind – are we linguists done?  Can we pack up our bags and go home? Although I think we understand something about human language – maybe a lot more than we did 70 years ago, it would be extreme hubris to say we really get all there is to human language at this point.  I expect there are plenty of surprises in store even as far as grammatical structure is concerned – and at every level of structure.  Many of the more interesting questions are likely to relate to how language is used in its cultural context — like the Pirahã avoiding speaking about the remote past because it is inaccessible to eyewitness verification.

That many lifetimes could be spent puzzling it all out is one of the great joys of linguistic discovery.  And to my way of thinking, the surprises about our human selves that lie in store is a primary reason to pursue language documentation as one of the great scientific and intellectual enterprises of our era.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe made its final flyby of the Earth on Friday in order to fling itself off towards its target: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Launched in 02004, Rosetta has made several planetary flybys in order to gain the velocity necessary to approach and eventually orbit the comet so that a small landing craft can touchdown upon and sample some of the comet’s material.  Scientists hope that a better understanding of the make-up of a comet will be like a key that will unlock many secrets about the formation of the planets and the development of our solar system.

Included on the craft is one of the early Rosetta Disks produced by Long Now.  The highly durable, format-independent linguistic archive will survive as long as the craft continues to orbit Comet 67P.  Unlike the Voyager Disks, this terrestrial artifact will remain in our solar system orbiting the comet, which is orbiting the Sun and will continue to do so until it runs into something (which could be quite a while).

You can see lots of great photos and amazing animations on the Rosetta blog, run by the ESA.  In addition, there was a lovely little piece in the Guardian highlighting the mission’s long-term nature:

The scientific pay-off from Rosetta could be huge. But contemplate the generosity of vision that made the mission possible. Some of those who lobbied for Rosetta will have died by the time the first results are delivered. Some young scientists who will build their careers on the data from Rosetta were not born when the mission was conceived. If, as Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics, Rosetta is a reminder that we can also think on a celestial timescale.

Officially inaugurated in 02002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an attempt by Egypt and the city of Alexandria to recreate, in spirit if not content, the original Library of Alexandria.  The Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt created what was at the time, the worlds largest library in the third century BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.  Though historical accounts disagree as to how, why and when, this massive repository of centuries of scholastic work was burned down and lost to the ages.

Long Now Board Member Michael Keller sent in notice of his event coming up at Stanford University on December 2nd in which Dr. Ismail Serageldin will be discussing his work as the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and his hopes for better dialogue between the West and the Muslim world:

Stanford University Libraries is pleased to present two lectures by Dr. Ismail Serageldin.

At 2:00 pm: The New Library of Alexandria: A Beacon of Knowledge

At 4:30 pm: For a Better Dialog Between the West and Muslims

Refreshments will be provided after the second lecture.

The lectures are being held in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium.  Call 650-736-9538 or email sonialee@stanford.edu for details/reservations.

Of Note: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a complete copy and physical backup of the Internet Archive.

In a new announcement by the Australian government, the equivalent of $7.8 million US dollars will go towards programs that work to save endangered aboriginal languages.

Australia is one of the linguistically rich regions of the world, in recent history having upwards of 275 distinct languages.  These languages also contain some fascinating linguistic features, such “mother-in-law” avoidance speech, unique noun class systems (witness the Dyirbal noun class for “women, fire, and dangerous things”), and words of surprising internal complexity (take for instance the Mayali word Abanyawoihwarrgahmarneganjginjeng. ‘I cooked the wrong meat for them again’.)

Of these 275 languages, 111 are now extinct, and an additional 100 languages are considered to be critically endangered, with only a few elderly speakers remaining.  To address this precipitous decline, the new program proposes to start with “translation services, tests for children and a feasibility study for a national centre for Aboriginal languages.”

Programs like this may seem like too little too late, but declaring these languages “national treasures” can actually go a long way in creating a better climate for their continued use.  A similar policy change came when the United States passed the Native American Languages Act of 1990, reversing decades of destructive government language policies, and setting up a grant program that continues to fund community-based language research to this day.

There is also support for aboriginal language documentation through a number of other grant programs, both large and small, that exist to support language documentation around the world.  These include the Endangered Language Fund (ELF), the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL), the US Federal Documenting Endangered Languages program and a few private programs such as The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Program and the Volkswagon Stiftung funded DoBes project.  Each of these programs has been underway for several years, and combined, have a rich portfolio of successful projects to their credit.

(Thanks to Stewart Brand for passing this news item along.)

Here is an interesting example of a linguistic game, a crowdsourced translation, and a potential Rosetta Genesis Text to boot — The Lolcat Bible (or, translated into Lolcat by yours truly:  “teh Ceiling Cat goodmeow accordingz to teh kitteh”):

“At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.  An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.  An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!! “

You can read the rest here.  And by the rest, I mean, all of it – the whole Bible translated into Lolcat – down to the book, chapter and verse. And, if you see something missing, you can add it yourself – it’s a wiki.

Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

A recent article in the New York Times describes the endangered language research of Tucker Childs, a linguist at Portland State University, who is in Sierra Leone studying the nearly extinct Kim language.  The death of the Kim language is attributed to the decision of younger speakers to learn the Mende language, spoken by 1.5 million people in Sierra Leone and Liberia. This pattern of language loss is common, especially in the era of globalization, when the ability to communicate beyond a local village is essential for economic success.

The article suggests that Kim is beyond the point of revitalization, but this makes the effort to document the language even more urgent. By documenting the Kim language, and then depositing the documentation with the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, Childs and his research team are working to make sure that knowledge of the Kim language will remain long after the language is no longer spoken.  This kind of information can contribute a great deal to ongoing linguistic research (such as the study of linguistic typology and what is possible in human language) and in some cases, has even provided enough information to bring languages back into active use after generations have passed.

Technology for gathering language documentation has changed dramatically, just as language documentation efforts have redoubled in the face of rapid and massive language extinction.  Audio and video recorders are all digital, and the work of building dictionaries and translating collected texts is now typically done on a laptop computer.  One of the most moving parts of The Linguists, a documentary chronicling the work of two endangered language researchers (viewable for free on Babelgum), comes when the last speakers of Chulym, a language of Siberia, are able to immediately see a digital video recording of themselves speaking their native language, which was heavily supressed in the Soviet era.

While digital technology provides new tools in the effort to document the world’s endangered languages, it also presents a challenge for archivists trying to preserve data that is “born digital” and only exists in a digital format. The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archive Network (DELAMAN), is a network of digital archives that support endangered language documentation by helping ensure that data remains safe, discoverable, accessible, and usable.  Participating archives like The Rosetta Project are working to develop and promote robust archival practices around the long-term storage of linguistic data.  Similar efforts have produced and promoted ISO 639-3 codes for 6,800 human languages, linguistics-specific metadata (see the Open Language Archives Community), and are promoting open and transparent file format standards for linguistic research (see the NSF-funded EMELD project)

Estimates of the number of the world’s languages are hard to nail down precisely.  Our best estimate comes from the current edition of the Ethnologue, which puts the number at 6,909...  6,909 languages. For a challenge, try naming a hundred.  Fifty.  Ten?  The notion of living in a world with almost 7,000 languages is an abstraction for nearly everybody.

One way to potentially visualize this is by locating languages on the map.  This may seem like a simple task, but the complexities become apparent when looking even at a single language such as English.  Besides native speakers, there are many non-native  speakers of English, who learn it as way to communicate with people around the world. How do you map these speakers? How do you show that English is spoken alongside many other languages, such as the many indigenous languages of North America and Australia? The complexity of language use calls for an approach to mapping that is more than placing a single point on a country, or even drawing geographic boundaries. A good map of the world’s languages must account for the many ways in which we interact with language in our daily lives.

One attempt is LL-Map, shown here.  This project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is working to integrate many different geo-linguistic factors into a single digital map interface. To date, this interface provides many different language map layers, combined with geographic data  related to climate, political divisions, and flora and fauna, both historical and current. By integrating these layers, LL-Map provides a tool for those who hope to better understand and study the complex factors of language use worldwide.