Almost ten years ago, the European Space Agency launched a probe with the goal of approaching and studying a comet. The probe was named Rosetta because, just as the Rosetta Stone allowed historians to piece together an ancient language and unlock a great deal of human history, the Rosetta probe will give us a better…  Read More

On Saturday October 19, 02013, Long Now participated in Exploratorium Market Days—a series of free, outdoor “mini-festivals” geared to educate the public through the science and art communities and museums. The theme of the month was “Heirlooms,” which focused on the “diverse treasures that we preserve and pass along to future generations.” Together the Rosetta…  Read More

This Saturday October the 19th, Rosetta and PanLex Project staff will be at the Exploratorium’s final Market Days event of this year. The Exploratorium has been holding these free, outdoor events in the spirit of “exchanging fresh ideas on local phenomena.” Saturday’s theme is Heirlooms and Rosetta and PanLex will showcase our planet’s diverse linguistic stock. Come…  Read More

The PanLex project of The Long Now Foundation, which is building a database of words and phrases in the world’s languages, has recently passed the one-billion-translation mark. That means there are now over a billion pairs of words or phrases, such as “clock” in English and “ঘড়ী” in Assamese, that PanLex records as attested translations of each…  Read More

Of the 145 indigenous languages spoken on the Australian continent, 110 are in danger of extinction, but a linguistics professor at the University of Sydney recently discovered a trove of documents that may help Australians better understand and preserve this diversity. It started with just a pair of small notebooks from the 19th century. Michael…  Read More

A group of scientists at the University of Southampton is pushing the frontier of long-term data storage technology to a new level. At a recent Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics in San José, the researchers announced their success at recording data in quartz glass by using a femtosecond laser. A femtosecond, or ultrafast, laser sends…  Read More

Among the photos on your walls, the art you’ve created, the things you’ve written or read – is there something you’d like to preserve for history? Something that you think deserves to be beheld by future generations, either for their edification or amusement? An Austrian project is offering a means to accomplish this by way…  Read More

On the blog of Long Now’s Rosetta Project, intern Karin Wiecha describes the recently published findings of a major linguistics research effort: ELCat uses the metaphor of biodiversity to illustrate the gravity of the loss of an entire language family: If we compare the extinction of a language to the extinction of an animal species, the…  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…  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 by police….  Read More