A recent study brings together archaeological, biological and linguistic research to posit that spoken language may be much older than previously thought. Authors Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson argue that emerging research indicates ancestors of modern humans as far back as 500,000 years ago may have been capable of spoken language, in contrast. . .   Read More

In a recent conversation with Edge, Stanford Psychologist and former SALT speaker Lera Boroditsky explores intriguing – and still controversial – questions about the relationship between the language we speak, and the way we think about the world.

Weaving her thoughts together with examples from a variety of different languages, Boroditsky shows us that languages differ in. . .   Read More

On The Rosetta Project Blog, intern Karin Wiecha writes:
Today mother tongues will be celebrated world wide. This date was chosen by UNESCO in recognition of the Bengali language movement, where on February 21, 01952, students protested for their language to become an official national language. Several protesters taking part in the demonstration were killed. . .   Read More

“The Decline of Violence”
Monday October 8, 02012 at the Herbst Theater, San Francisco

Steven Pinker’s prolific output for both academic and popular audiences has made him one of the most well-known evolutionary psychologists in the world. Trained formally in cognitive psychology, Pinker has tirelessly applied lessons from his groundbreaking research to a. . .   Read More

Duelity from Ryan Uhrich on Vimeo.
Duelity is a split-screen animation that tells both sides of the story of Earth’ s origins in a dizzying and provocative journey through the history and language that marks human thought.
Marcos Ceravolo and Ryan Uhrich designed and directed the short animation Duelity with the Vancouver Film School. . .   Read More

On July 20, 01969, humans landed on the surface of the moon for the first time. But since only two of us got to go, NASA sent a message “FROM PLANET EARTH” in the rest of humanity’s stead. The message wasn’t a letter written in ink and paper, though. It was a thin. . .   Read More

On July 9, Rosetta Project director Laura Welcher will be giving a talk in the Long Now museum on “Bringing the World’s ~ 7,000 Languages Online.” This talk is part of an ongoing series offered by SF Globalization, a San Francisco meetup group interested in software localization and internationalization.

“There are nearly 7,000. . .   Read More

The Rosetta Project and PanLex Project at The Long Now Foundation are excited to announce that we are participating in a new initiative called the Endangered Languages Project, which is backed by the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity.

As member organization of the Alliance, we will be providing support for the Project, which aims to:

– accelerate. . .   Read More

The September 02011 issue of the journal Language included an article entitled “A Cross-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate,” by a team of linguists working with the University of Lyon and the French National Center for Scientific Research. Like many linguistic studies, this one investigates the parameters of human language and seeks to identify. . .   Read More

PanLex, the newest project under the umbrella of The Long Now Foundation, has an ambitious plan: to create a database of all the words of all of the world’s languages. The plan is not merely to collect and store them, but to link them together so that any word in any language can be. . .   Read More