Back in 02009 through a partnership with Applied Minds, and in turn the Air Force Research Lab (who generously invited us to include a sample), we sent one of our Rosetta materials on an experiment called MISSE-7 (pronounced “missey”), which flew on the International Space Station.  This experiment is a shorter term version of the material research begun in 01984 with the Long Duration Exposure Facility.  We sent a sample of commercially pure titanium, that was black oxide coated, and laser marked (pictured below left). This is the same material and oxide process that was used to create the front of the original Rosetta Disk. However we used a much lower power laser than was used on the Rosetta disk so the marking was not very deep.  The sample was just returned to us (below right) after its stint outside the ISS and looks no worse for wear at all except for a slight fade in the clarity of the etching.

  
(Sample before it was sent on left and after returning on right)

This marks our second space rated Rosetta Disk material,  the first one was the nickel material that is currently on the ESAs Rosetta Mission.  Below is all the info I have found out about the MISSE-7 mission so far.  I am trying to locate the section of the EVA videos where the experiment gets installed and removed.  Any help is appreciated.

• Samples went up on STS 129 (Atlantis) on Nov. 16, 2009
• Samples were placed on the back side (wake) of the ISS on Nov. 23, 2009
• Samples orbited Earth at ~8km/s
• Samples returned to earth on STS-134  June 1 02011

INSTALLATION:
MISSE-7 installed during  EVA 3 on shuttle Atlantis flight STS 129
Video CG Simulation of EVA 3, MISSE-7 at 2min, and 3:22

• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/548353main_MISSE-77.jpg
• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/547356main_MISSE-75.jpg
• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/556618main_MISSE-79.jpg

The Berkeley Language Center will be hosting a talk by Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher on November 9th. The talk is open to the public and starts at 3:00pm in Dwinelle Hall B-4.

The Rosetta Project at The Long Now Foundation is working to build an open public digital collection of all human language as well as an analog backup that can last for thousands of years–The Rosetta Disk. In the “long now,” the goal is long-term storage and access to information–on the scale that both supports and transcends individual human societies and civilizations. In the “here and now,” the project serves to support and amplify the importance of the world’s nearly 7,000 human languages, the vast majority of which are endangered and, if current trends continue, likely to go extinct in the next 100 years. I’ll present our current work on the Rosetta Project Collection and Disk as well as some new initiatives including the “Language Commons” where we are working to help build the multilingual Web.

There will be a reception afterwards; come say Hello.

With thousands of languages and writing systems used all over the world, making computers and the web widely accessible has taken a herculean effort, with much yet to be done.

One of the main tools used in the expansion of the web’s global reach is Unicode – a database of over 193,000 characters from 93 different writing systems and the standards for using and representing them.

Unicode is maintained by The Unicode Consortium, which sponsors a conference each year to share knowledge and discuss the future of Unicode.

This year the Internationalization and Unicode Conference will be held October 17th – 19th in Santa Clara, CA.

Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher will be delivering a keynote presentation on Tuesday October 18th of her work on The Rosetta Project, a publicly accessible digital library of human languages, and The Language Commons:

The Rosetta Project shares the Unicode vision of a world where people can use communication technology on their own terms – in their own language.

According to World Internet Statistics, over 80% of all web communication is in about ten languages, with over half in either English or Chinese. The remaining 20% represent “everyone else” including about 400 languages with speaker populations above 1 million, which collectively comprise about 95% of everyone on earth.

Because of essential technologies like Unicode, we are poised to see this breadth of human languages flourish online and on mobile devices, providing for these languages a critical new domain of language use in the modern world. I will present several efforts underway at The Rosetta Project including the “Language Commons” that rely on Unicode as an essential technology in building the multilingual Web.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Lindsey, National Geographic

Updated Schedule of Events!

Plan to attend in-person or remotely?

RSVP here through EventBrite!

Help us record 50 languages in a single day!

Did you know…

• UNESCO considers the use of one’s native language to be a basic human right?
• Half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered and may become extinct this century?
• Over 100 languages are spoken right here in the San Francisco Bay area?

There is something you can do to help document and promote the languages used in your own community! We need your help to meet our goal of recording 50 languages in a single day! How many languages can you help us document? Bring yourself and your multilingual friends and be the stars of your own grassroots language documentation project!

Professional linguists and videographers will be on site to document you and your friends speaking word lists, reading texts, and telling stories. You can also document your language using tools you probably have in your purse or back pocket — a mobile phone, digital camera, or laptop — just bring your device and our team will guide you through the documentation process.

How do your words and stories make a difference? An important part of language documentation is building a corpus — creating collections of vocabulary words, as well as conversations and stories that demonstrate language in use. From a corpus, linguists and speech technologists can build grammars, dictionaries, and tools that enable a language to be used online. The bigger the corpus, the better the tools!

The recordings you make during the event will be added to The Rosetta Project’s open collection of all human language in The Internet Archive. And, you can compete for cool prizes, including an iPad 2 for the participant who records and uploads the most languages during the event!

Please RSVP below and let us know if you plan to attend, and what language or languages you are thinking of recording. Can’t make it to the Record-a-thon? Join us online the day of the event for the virtual Record-a-thon, where you’ll be able to interact with event staff, monitor event progress, listen live to lectures and talks, and submit your own recordings remotely.

We will be in touch soon with more information about the day’s events, and how you can participate! For questions or more information please contact rosetta@longnow.org.

In a new study published in the journal Language and Cognition “When Time is Not Space,” a team of researchers from University of Portsmouth and Federal University of Rondonia claim that the Amondawa, a small Amazonian tribe, speak a language with a very uncommon conceptualization of time. The story was recently picked up by BBC, revealing that the debate about whether language influences thought is very much alive and newsworthy.

According to researchers Sinha et al., the Amondawa have no words for talking abstractly about time (as in the English word ‘time’), or time periods (like ‘year’):

“What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occurring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

The mapping of time to physical space is commonly found in human language, and its absence in Amondawa is perhaps the most surprising result of the study. Rather than having a time-space metaphor, the Amondawa conceptualization of time is based on “social activity, kinship and ecological regularity.”

Pierre Pica, a theoretical linguist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, question the conclusions derived from this new research. Pica explains that just because Amondawa does not use cardinal chronology, does not mean they view themselves advancing through time any differently than the rest of us who use a cardinal chronological system.

Sinha et al. state that the tribe’s language in no way affects their cognitive ability to grasp temporal concepts — they talk about events, and sequences of events, and learn Portuguese which does have abstract time expressions. Rather, the Amondawa language provides a different way of construing and talking about temporal concepts in daily life.

This contention about whether the Amondawa language affects its speakers’ thought processes hearkens back to a famous study by Benjamin Lee Whorf on the Hopi Language in the first half of the 20th century. This study was a foundational example for Whorf’s “linguistic relativity hypothesis” – the idea that the language you speak influences the way you think. From his study of Hopi, Whorf concluded:

“The Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call TIME, or to past, present or future, or to enduring or lasting…the Hopi language contains no reference to TIME, either explicit or implicit.” [1]

Whorf’s ideas about Hopi have received a great deal of criticism over the years, and his data was critiqued as erroneous evidence resulting from deficient research practices. [2] Nevertheless, the idea that language influences thought has certainly stuck around, and is now being raised by a new generation of researchers like Sinha et al who are gathering new data from small and threatened languages around the world.

For more on the relationship of language and thought, listen to our podcasts of previous Long Now seminars by Lera Boroditsky as well as Daniel Everett who talks about Pirahã, a language also from the Amazon.

[1] Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1950. An American Indian Model of the Universe. The
International Journal of American Linguistics 16(2).

[2] In an interview by BBC, Guy Deutscher explains his ideas about language and thought in addition to describing Benjamin Whorf’s research on Hopi Language.

The author of this post, Colin Farlow, is a 02011 summer intern with the Rosetta Project. He recently graduated from Indiana University, where he studied East Asian Languages and Cultures and Philosophy.

Two language families' trees from Dr. Dunn's paper, with two word-order traits.

How does human language work? What are its possibilities and limitations? Where did it come from? Many linguists have asked these questions and made contributions to our understanding of language, but how do they get their answers?

One approach is to go out and document a language, which can then be compared to other languages, writings from the past, etc. Through various methods, linguists have succeeded in discovering patterns within and between languages that allow us to define some of their parameters and to organize them into families.   But, as two recent publications demonstrate, our ability to recognize patterns—and their underlying causes—may be dramatically increasing with the development of technology that can centralize, organize and manipulate enormous amounts of information.

The two studies were highlighted in The Economist, and both of them offer conclusions that are likely to spark lively debate. Dr. Michael Dunn, from the Netherlands’ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, published a paper in Nature magazine addressing word-order dependencies—the idea that, for example, if a given language places verbs before objects (eat lunch) it will also place prepositions before nouns (at home). By comparing different languages, linguists have found that there are some strong consistencies in these dependencies, indicating that they are the result of “underlying cognitive or systems biases.” Dr. Dunn, however, has used large databases of basic vocabularies and statistical methods borrowed from evolutionary biology to approach the problem of dependencies in a different way:

To substitute for fossils, and thus reconstruct the ancient branches of the tree as well as the modern-day leaves, Dr Dunn used mathematically informed guesswork. The maths in question is called the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. As its name suggests, this spins the software equivalent of a roulette wheel to generate a random tree, then examines how snugly the branches of that tree fit the modern foliage. It then spins the wheel again, to tweak the first tree ever so slightly, at random. If the new tree is a better fit for the leaves, it is taken as the starting point for the next spin. If not, the process takes a step back to the previous best fit. The wheel whirrs millions of times until such random tweaking has no discernible effect on the outcome.

When Dr Dunn fed the languages he had chosen into the MCMC casino, the result was several hundred equally probable family trees. Next, he threw eight grammatical features, all related to word order, into the mix, and ran the game again.

He found that particular word-order traits were not necessarily linked to others in the way that current theories propose. Rather, such dependencies seemed to be ‘lineage-specific,’ suggesting that they have been passed down through language families. “Nurture, in other words, rather than nature,” as The Economist put it.

The other article, published in Science by Dr. Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland, also uses statistics and databases in an innovative way. He looked at information from the World Atlas of Language Structures on sounds in different languages and found that phonemic diversity (the number of sounds used in a language) decreases as you follow the pathways of human migration outwards from central/southern Africa. The Science article argues that modern language originated in that part of Africa and that phonemic diversity decreased with every stage of human expansion as small groups of people set off in search of new territory.

Both of these studies utilize phylogenetic language groupings, based on evolutionary theory, and they run statistical analyses with large amounts of data made available by central repositories of linguistic information, such as the World Atlas of Language Structures. The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project is an effort to improve and facilitate that very sort of creative methodology—to organize and make available large amounts of data so that researchers can develop fundamentally new methods of inquiry.

After selling only 800 models last year – down from over 10,000 as recently as 02009 – the last typewriter factory in the world (according to The Daily Mail) has closed its doors and halted production. The factory was run by Godrej and Boyce and was based in Mumbai, India. The majority of the typewriters being produced in the last few years were for writers of Arabic in countries where modern PCs have yet to fully penetrate the market.

Despite the demise of industrial production, it seems likely the typewriter will live on. Kevin Kelly once said technologies are immortal and if the collector/maintainer culture that’s already going strong around typewriters is any indication, manually thwacking ink onto paper has a good run ahead of it yet:

• For the real, restored thing there’s myTypewriter.com
• Rarotype Inc. in Sunrise, Florida still manufactures printwheels for use in manual typewriters of many different brands.
• Mr. T pities the early-adopting fool: “With a typewriter from MrTypewriter.com you can rest assured that you have invested in a quality machine that has been fully tested and restored to once again provide many years of reliable service for today’s wordsmiths. “
• You can live in a typewriter factory in Emerson, IL.
• Check out these USB Typewriters for giving your iPad that vintage feel.
• The Early Office Museum explores the history of typewriters.
• IBM has an online timeline describing their contributions to typewriter technology.

(Sent in by Katie Malone – thanks!)

Photo by Pat Tufts

Languages are works of art, great libraries, how-to guides for living on planet Earth, windows into our minds and inalienable human rights. Long Now’s own Dr. Laura Welcher, Director of Operations and The Rosetta Project, spoke on March 3rd to a group of Long Now Members about the beauty, variety and value in the almost 7,000 languages spoken in the world. The event was part of our new Salon Series: occasional, intimate talks held in The Long Now Museum & Store for Members of the Foundation.

Laura’s talk was called The Rosetta Project and The Language Commons and in it she discussed several efforts to preserve linguistic diversity around the world. The Long Now Foundation’s role thus far, she explained, has been to develop and manufacture The Rosetta Disk: a durable, nickel archive of linguistic data. Laura also discussed her work with The Language Commons Working Group – a collaboration of linguists, archivists and programmers working to create an open and accessible encyclopedia of languages and linguistic diversity as a tool for teaching, studying, preserving and sharing languages.

The full audio of Laura’s talk can be streamed from the player below or downloaded as an mp3. You can also click through the slides she presented in the window below the audio player.

Human Language in the Palm of my Hand

by Zane Selvans

One of the Rosetta discs was recently bequeathed to the University of Colorado libraries, and the Long Now put out a request for pictures of it in its new home.  I eagerly responded by heading to the special collections in Norlin yesterday.  It didn’t seem to be on display anywhere, so when the librarian made eye contact, I said I was here to see the Rosetta disc, and she sent someone off to get it.  And they took it out of its Pelican case, and set it on the table in front of me (after I’d filled out a reader card and agreed only to take notes in pencil… or by digital means — no pens are allowed near the old books)  At first I was hesitant to touch it, and asked if it was okay, and she said “Oh it doesn’t look like the kind of thing that requires any special handling.”  So I picked it up.

I was amazed at the weight of the thing.  The tungsten hemisphere (I think it’s tungsten anyway… but maybe I’m thinking of one of the clock parts) [ed. note - it is actually stainless steel]  is much denser than most everyday objects.  That, plus the iridescent sheet of the etched words and the distortion of the lens makes it into a strange kind of artifact.  It’s obviously a weird thing.  I couldn’t help but think of Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, and the difficulty of attempting to ensure that we communicate anything tens of thousands of years into the future.  His one way conversation with those who inherit our histories.  These spheres are beautiful art and elegant thought experiments today, but holding one made me envision the world in which they were actually needed, where they’ve been used for their intended purpose.  Far seeing, informational time machines.  Linguistic Palantír.  It’s both horrifying and hopeful to think about what could come to pass in our deep futures.

If this thing has been used, then darkness fell one day.

If this thing has been used, then someone made it through, and they want to know again.

I couldn’t help myself.  I had to open it up.  Gingerly.  It’s a hard thing to handle, so smooth and round and heavy enough that it’s challenging to control it with one hand.  The lockring tinkled down and the librarian looked over a little surprised.  “Oh, I didn’t know you could open it.”

Have you looked at it.  Do you know what it is?  Something to do with languages.  Mmm.  Yes.

With only a single change of custody, all information about the thing had already apparently been lost.  They said that when it was checked in to the collections, it hadn’t come with any accompanying documentation.  Just a strange heavy sphere in a padded box.  The box was labeled, saying who it had come from, and naming it a Rosetta disc, but that was about it.  It’s supposed to be usable even without any documentation — that’s kind of the point — but it certainly does highlight the fragility of information.  I tweeted to the Long Now afterward, and they’ve sent “Care and Feeding” documentation to the curator.  Somehow it feels good to have participated, even peripherally, in the smuggling of this information into the future.

In 02008, one of the first prototype Rosetta Disks went to the family of the late Charles Butcher, who was the founder of The Lazy 8 Foundation. Lazy Eight was one of the first supporters of the Long Now 10,000 Year Library and Rosetta Projects.

This Rosetta Disk has now been donated by the Charles Butcher family to the University of Colorado Boulder. It looks like it is housed in the Library Special Collections, and that it is currently on exhibit as part of Realia: Everyday Objects from Other Lives.

If anyone has a chance to go visit the Rosetta Disk in this exhibit, please send us photos!

A pdf of this poster is available for download here (12 MB).

Using data from the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg combined with his own research, linguist Rick Aschmann created the detailed map above to show regional dialects throughout North America.  One of the coolest features is that he’s linked over 600 YouTube videos to the map, so that clicking a region will take you to video clips of (mostly famous) people raised in that area so that you can hear a sample of the dialect.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have done some similar research, though they’re using social media – Twitter specifically – as the data source, rather than just to illustrate linguistic nuance. Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues looked at 380,000 geo-tagged tweets recently and explored the geographical dialects represented within. They saw differences in the way people abbreviate words to fit the short medium and the slang terms they used in informal messaging and were able to create a statistical model from the variation they saw that could predict the location of a user to within about 300 miles based on the dialect used.

The existence of Twitter and other informal, microblogging platforms affords a newly accessible, low-cost source of data for linguistics researchers since they don’t require labor-intensive in-person interviews to uncover patterns of informal speech:

Studies of regional dialects traditionally have been based primarily on oral interviews, Eisenstein said, noting that written communication often is less reflective of regional influences because writing, even in blogs, tends to be formal and thus homogenized. But Twitter offers a new way of studying regional lexicon, he explained, because tweets are informal and conversational. Furthermore, people who tweet using mobile phones have the option of geotagging their messages with GPS coordinates.

- Carnegie Mellon University

Eisenstein also points out that the identifiable regional variation could be an indicator that the internet is less a force for homogenization than often thought.

The Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics later this year will explore many ways in which these, “new worlds of words occasion innovative uses of language and new spaces for constructing identities, forming relationships, and expressing social meanings.” (GURT 2011)

So, expect to see plenty more research mining social media and remember to act normal online so you don’t throw off the results.

Google’s new Ngram Viewer is a graphical interface for looking at the frequency of words over time in the several million books scanned into their database.  As a publicly mine-able data set, it’s huge and ripe for exploration with 500 years’ worth of published books spanning several languages.  And while it may seem a simple ‘just so’ kind of information to be able to call up how often a word was used in a particular year, the lives of words can often illuminate historical and cultural trends in surprising ways.

A paper published by researchers who helped develop the project (and summarized by Discover) rounded up a few interesting findings.  One delectably recursive tidbit they mentioned was that a search for years (ie. 1865, 1990) can show the historical efforts focused on particular eras and the extent to which those years remain part of present day discussion.

They found a general trend each individual year follows: a spike just before the year followed by a downward trending long tail as it recedes into history.  They also, however, noticed a trend amongst that pattern: higher peaks with shorter tails.

When the team looked at the frequency of individual years, they found a consistent pattern. In their own words: “’1951’ was rarely discussed until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its frequency soared in 1951, remained high for three years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next fifteen years.” But the shape of these graphs is changing. The peak gets higher with every year and we are forgetting our past with greater speed. The half-life of ‘1880’ was 32 years, but that of ‘1973’ was a mere 10 years.

So, at a cultural level, we can see a developing ‘presentism’ in which the year we’re currently inhabiting takes on great significance, but is more quickly forgotten once it’s passed.

Enormous Microscopic Evening examines the museum from a microscopic perspective with CRITTER, a San Francisco-based salon dedicated to expanding the relationships between culture and the environment. The evening will focus on demonstrations and workshops about building and manipulating microscopes. Materials and samples taken from around the museum will be examined. Continuing the theme of microscopy, there will be micro performances (short concerts with tiny instruments) and other related events throughout the museum.