(May 02009) The Rosetta Project Archive of all human languages is now available as a special collection in the Internet Archive. The collection can be browsed in the Internet Archive by language name, Rosetta document type ("Detailed Description", "Genesis Translation", etc.) and by three-letter ISO language code. Each document can be viewed or downloaded as PDF, Djvu, as well as in an embeddable flip book format (beta). A first OCR pass also makes each document available as live, searchable text. The Rosetta Collection at the Internet Archive was made possible by Brewster Kahle, director and co-founder of the Internet Archive, who is a long time supporter of the Rosetta Project and a caretaker of a first-edition Rosetta Disk.
(March 02009) The Rosetta Disk Language Archive, Version 1 was completed by The Long Now Foundation in 02008. And now, by opening this link, you can virtually browse and explore the contents of the disk, just as you would if you were looking at the micro-etched Rosetta Disk with a high-powered microscope.
(December 02008) We are pleased to announce that William Lidwell has made a very generous donation to the Rosetta Project, and will be the recipient of remaining First Edition Rosetta Disk. Mr. Lidwell, author of "Universal Principles of Design" and soon-to-be-released "Deconstructing Product Design", has followed The Rosetta Project and Long Now Foundation for many years. He became interested in the design and content of the Rosetta Disk as part of his research for an upcoming article on information design and extraterrestrial communication.
(November 02008) Here are the first pictures of our very first completed First Edition Rosetta Disk with over 13,000 microscopic pages of information on 1,500 languages!
(October 02008) During his presentation at Pop!Tech 2008: Scarcity and Abundance, Dr. K. David Harrison discussed how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. He also detailed efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide. This video is hosted at DotSub, a crowdsourced translation site. If you log in to DotSub you can help translate his talk into any language!
(October 02008) One of the very limited edition disks is going to Oliver Wilke, who has started a foundation for the support of endangered and minority languages around the world. Read more about the development and design of the disk and the Wilke Foundation in this blog post by Long Now Foundation board member Kevin Kelly.
(May 02008) Rosetta's Google Earth layer featuring the Alan Lomax audio recordings from around the world was selected as a showcase for Google Earth Outreach.
(April 02008) Rosetta's Google Earth layers were selected as a featured project in the Netsquared Mashup Challenge - thanks to all the Rosetta Community Members who voted! Next we go to the Netsquared Conference where participants will vote for the project most worthy of Netsquared development support. Stay tuned!
(March 02008) Over 120 mashup ideas addressing a multitude of social and political issues. Create a Netsquared account to vote for your five favorites. Voting runs from March 17-24. Rosetta's proposal is described here.
(March 02008) Rosetta is pleased to announce the newest way to browse the Rosetta collection. Download these layers to listen to Rosetta recordings, learn about Endangered Languages, and check out some of our ideas for future layers.
(January 02008) The Rosetta Project was awarded an NSF grant for Pangloss -- a project to study the feasibility of building interlinear text glossing and manipulation capabilities into OpenOffice.org. We aim to develop a preliminary plugin extension for inputting, glossing and manipulating interlinear texts, research standards for the encoding of interlinear glossed texts within the OpenDocumentFormat and make recommendations for future best-practice developments in these areas. The major research and programming portions of the project will be completed by the beginning of June 02008.
(September 02007) The grant project, made possible by The Christensen Fund, will focus on increasing the number of active Rosetta Community members. We will be using the funding to create user guides, a F.A.Q., and pages that highlight our most interesting forums. We hope these measures will lead to increased participation among our current users, that in turn inspires new users to create accounts so they too can join in the conversation. We really want the language forums to succeed, so for those of you who have been lurking, now is the time to start posting! If you have questions about the forums and you don't want to wait for a user guide or the new F.A.Q., please don't hesitate to write us at rosetta@longnow.org.
(April 02007) The Webby Awards, the leading international honor for the Web, today recognized The Rosetta Project as an Official Honoree, a distinction that recognizes work exhibiting remarkable achievement. Rosetta was given this honor in the Science Division.
(April 02007) On Sunday, February 25, the Rosetta Space Probe containing one of the prototypes of the Rosetta Disk did a successful fly-by of Mars in a risky slingshot maneuver to increase the spacecraft's orbital energy. The Rosetta craft, launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency, will reach its destination -- comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko in the year 2014. Once in the comet's orbit, the craft will release a module with harpoons that will attach to the comet's icy surface, conducting over 11 carefully designed experiments. The mission seeks to learn more about the development of the Solar System by studying the composition of the comet, one of the Solar System's most primitive objects. In a gesture reminiscent of the "golden phonograph record" included on Voyager 1 with greetings in fifty-five languages, the European Space Agency requested that a Rosetta Disk be launched with the Rosetta craft. This disk, which will remain in orbit around the comet, is certainly a "golden record" for the new millenium -- microetched with information on over 2000 languages!
(February 02007) A brand new feature of the Rosetta Project Digital Language Archive is the ability for users to discuss any language or resource in the collection. Every language in the Archive has an associated discussion forum that you can access by logging in and creating a member page. You can then use member pages and discussion forums to find others who share your interests. The language discussion boards might be a great place to use a language online (on a site that is devoted to its promotion!), to share language learning and teaching experiences, to have a "word of the day"...and probably many others we haven't thought of yet. Our goal is to make the Rosetta Archive an active place for learning about and using the world's nearly 7,000 languages. In addition to discussion boards for individual languages, we've also built a feature for commenting on individual items in the archive (like a print grammar, or an audio recording). Since everyone can access the notes, it can be a place where you can work with others to build knowledge about particular materials in the Archive. The development of the Rosetta Community Discussion Tools was made possible through the generous support of The Christensen Fund.
(October 02006) The Rosetta Project has a large collection of basic vocabulary for nearly half of the world's languages. In order to better curate and display this collection, Rosetta is partnering with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to expand the database and build a multi-functional word list tool. The expanded database will be used by the Intercontinental Dictionary Series project, and will be made accessible here on The Rosetta Project website.
(October 02006) The Rosetta Project is collaborating with the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) to make a collection of historic sound recordings of native California Indian languages available online for language revitalization and scholarly research. The sound recordings, a selection of more than 1,300 recordings produced by John Peabody Harrington and his associates between 1912 and 1941, document the languages, myths, legends, stories and songs of thirty-five Native American tribes. The digitized sound recordings will appear on this site and in SIRIS, the Smithsonian's online public access catalog. For more information, please visit this page at The National Anthropological Archives.
(October 02006) This collection of language samples was originally assembled by Alan Lomax, an ethnomusicologist well known for his work collecting and promoting American folk music--what is less known is that with the assistance of linguists and anthropologists from around the world he also assembled a large and incredibly diverse collection of language recordings. This collection of over 250 reel-to-reel tapes was sent to us by the Association for Cultural Equity (run by Anna Lomax Wood, Mr. Lomax's daughter), and although the physical reel to reel tapes are ultimately destined for the Library of Congress, we will be serving the digital language collection from the Rosetta site.
(October 02006) Please take a look at our page on technical documentation, which has a paper on the design of the database structure of our site ("Modeling Contested Categories in Linguistic Databases").
(October 02006) Rosetta has taken steps in the last few months to make use of ISO 639-3 language codes in relevant areas of the site in order to conform to international standards for language identification. Most of our data made it through the transition without problems, but some languages and resources still need to be migrated to this new coding system. If you think a language of interest to you got "lost" in the process, please let us know. We'd like to assure our users that any omissions are purely due to technical problems, and we aim to get all of our data for all languages back up and online as soon as possible.
The Rosetta Disk
