When we talk “long,” how long do we mean? Multiple horizons all compete for real estate in one word. Richard Fisher doesn’t mind, though, seeing opportunity in language’s . . .   Read More

A six-part podcast from Emergence Magazine explores the plight of four Indigenous languages spoken in California—Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu—among the most vulnerable in the world: “Two centuries ago, as many as ninety languages and three hundred dialects were spoken in California; today, only half of these languages . . .   Read More

Created in just 24 hours by Steph Smith, Eunoia offers hundreds of untranslatable words in a useful and accessible online dictionary. Eunoia is itself an untranslatable word meaning a “well-mind” or “beautiful thinking.” The user can search Eunoia’s database by “language, tag, or the word itself. There are over 500 words in . . .   Read More

In 01890, anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes traveled to Eastern Maine to document the Passamaquoddy Tribe. By then, war, disease, and unhonored treaties by local and federal authorities had reduced the tribe to a few hundred members. Fewkes brought with . . .   Read More

Meet Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly, a mother-son duo translating astrophysics into the Native American language Siksika (Blackfoot).

On April 1, scientists will officially restart their search for gravitational waves after a year spent making improvements to massive twin detectors. Discoveries should soon start rolling in, and when they do, there’s. . .   Read More

In an unassuming office on the fourth floor of Downtown Berkeley’s historic Chamber of Commerce high rise, three linguists are at work building the world’s largest lexical translation database. The mission of PanLex, a project of The Long Now Foundation, is to overcome language barriers to human rights, information, and opportunities. After ten. . .   Read More

Every word
The PanLex project aims to translate every word from every language into every other language. We already have solid groundwork with 10,000 language varieties and 22 million expressions in the PanLex database, but we still have a long way to go, especially with the more obscure and under-documented languages of the. . .   Read More

If we want to achieve the miracle of translation from any language into any other language, it would be enormously helpful to have a machine that can translate any word, or word-like phrase, from any language into any other language. The PanLex project aims to build exactly that machine. It is documenting all known. . .   Read More

Just off the coast of Australia, a few miles west of Perth, lie three small limestone islands. Today they’re a popular destination for boat trips and air taxis, but a local Aboriginal tribe tells stories of a time when these three isles were connected to the mainland by lush forest. One day, the stories. . .   Read More

This short documentary tells the story of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the dictionary she created in an effort to keep her language alive. Long Now’s PanLex project collects dictionaries such as these with the goal of creating a universal translation engine and fighting language extinction. . .   Read More