Created page with " =Description= By Michele Lent Hirsch: "Several people-powered efforts come out of the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project (which is not related to the Rosetta Ston..."
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=Description=
By Michele Lent Hirsch:
"Several people-powered efforts come out of the [[Long Now Foundation]]’s Rosetta Project (which is not related to the Rosetta Stone software, though that company does have an endangered languages program). One is called a Record-a-Thon. In this grassroots series of events, community members gather together to record the languages they know with basic equipment like phones and laptops. In another Rosetta endeavor, anyone with an internet connection can upload audio or text files to the organization’s website. A person can read aloud passages of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Swedish or in Tagalog, for instance, and help 30th-century linguists compare the same words across thousands of other submissions. The eventual result will be a modern version of the ancient Rosetta Stone—if, say, 2 million humans had contributed.
The project stores its updated trove at the Internet Archive for all to access. It also etches linguistic info in teensy letters onto durable metal disks whose texts can be read under a microscope, potentially for millennia to come. Other initiatives foster speech sharing, such as the Endangered Languages Project, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, and the Endangered Language Fund, of which the esteemed linguist Noam Chomsky is a board member.
It will likely take years to gather every idiom, every inflection, every umlaut on earth. But, the idea goes, when folks in different towns contribute to a huge, collaborative effort, we can each share some useful knowledge. And by collectively preserving at-risk languages for future generations, we might even make your grandma happy."
(http://www.shareable.net/blog/can-the-sharing-economy-keep-yiddish-and-cherokee-alive)
[[Category:Intelligence]]