The Rosetta Project is an international association of linguists and native speakers working to create a public digital library containing information about the languages used by humanity . Upon completion of the work, the accumulated material is supposed to be recorded on a nickel disk (the so-called “Rosetta disk”) by engraving , which, according to developers, will allow you to store the archive from 2 to 10 thousand years. The project is led by the private organization Long Now Foundation . To date, it has already been possible to collect about 100 thousand pages of text in more than 2500 languages.
The project is named after the famous Rosetta stone , on which an identical text in Egyptian and Ancient Greek was knocked out. (This parallelism allowed J.-F. Champollion in 1822 to develop a successful method for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs .)
Content
Concept
According to experts, under the influence of globalization and the widespread prevalence of dominant languages, up to 90% of the languages of small groups may disappear within a century, many of which are poorly documented or not documented at all. Even now, only 95% of the total world population speaks 95% of existing languages.
As a measure to preserve the heritage of linguistic diversity, the Long Now Foundation has created the Rosetta project, whose main goals are:
- Creating an unprecedented platform for research and education in the field of comparative linguistics
- Development and wide dissemination of a functional linguistic tool that can help in the restoration of lost languages in the future
- Creation of the “Rosetta Disc” - a reliable repository of the language archive and a unique artifact that can cause admiration for the diversity of human experience and iconic systems.
Rosetta Disc
The Rosetta disk is made of nickel alloy, the diameter of the disk is 5.08 cm. The image of the Earth is etched on the surface of the disk in the center, and a message is sent along the edges in eight main languages. Initially available for reading with the naked eye, the text spirals down to micron sizes. The disc is supposed to accommodate 15,000 pages of text, the transverse size of which will be about 0.5 mm Since the pages will be engraved on the disk as regular images, reading will only require five-hundred-fold optical zoom (see optical microscope ).
Press Publications
- Bartoshevich-Zhagel, Yaroslav. New Rosetta Stone (inaccessible link) . Home computer (November 6, 2002). Date of treatment July 3, 2012. Archived on September 27, 2007.
- Sheepdog, Yuri. Keeps forever // Labor . - July 6, 2000. - No. 123 .
Links
- The Rosetta Project (English) - official site of the project
Rosetta Google Maps KMZ Project ( KMZ Label File for Google Earth )