On January 9, The Rosetta Project presented a poster at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, describing a distributed archive model we’ve developed and implemented with the Rosetta digital collection. Here is a video describing this model, and some of its long-term benefits:

A pdf of this poster is available for download. . .   Read More

Join Long Now’s Rosetta Project on November 6 from 4 – 7 pm at UCLA’s Hammer Museum where we team up with San Francisco-based CRITTER for an Enormous Microscopic Evening.  We’ll put a Rosetta Disk under the microscope, check out the fine (and finer) print, and maybe hunt for Easter eggs…  More. . .   Read More

Jessie Little Doe Baird, a linguist who has worked for years on reviving the Wampanoag (Wôpanâak) Language, has just been awarded a 02010 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in honor of her work and research.

Baird, who is of Wamponoag heritage, studied at MIT under the indigenous language scholar Kenneth Hale. By immersing herself in. . .   Read More

Last Friday evening, Long Now joined the Global Lives Project in celebrating their world premiere opening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  Through a huge volunteer effort, Global Lives has produced ten films – each 24 hours long – that visually capture the everyday life of ten people around the planet.  And on. . .   Read More

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. . .   Read More

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. . .   Read More

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. . .   Read More

Stewart forwards this beautifully detailed rendering of the Rosetta Mission by artist Erik Viktor, showing the landing craft on the icy surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasiamenko and the sun beyond.  The main spacecraft above is the orbiter, with 14 meter solar panels on each side.  The orbiter has eleven groups of scientific instruments, intended. . .   Read More

From TechOn!: “Japanese researchers prototyped a memory system that can store large volumes of data for more than a thousand years. The system, “Digital Rosetta Stone (DRS),” was announced June 16, 2009, by Keio University, Sharp Corp and Kyoto University at the 2009 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, which is taking place in Kyoto, Japan (lecture. . .   Read More

Whether the language you speak fundamentally shapes your thinking (sometimes referred to as “linguistic relativity”) is a question that usually comes up in Linguistics 101, along with a set of well known examples — Hopi time, Eskimo words for snow — that would seem, a priori, to indicate the answer is “yes”.  Recent research, however, conducted by. . .   Read More