Rosetta Project

The Rosetta project is a project of the Long Now Foundation that aims to compile all the languages currently in danger of disappearing. This database would symbolically translate into the creation of a new Rosetta stone.

In the 2000s, it is possible that there were still some 7,000 spoken languages in the world, including dialects. The magazine Ethnologue published a whole list in one of its last issues. According to scholars on the subject, in a couple of generations around 500 of these languages will have disappeared without a trace. Linguists and ethnologists believe that half of the 7,000 languages might fall out of use by the end of the 21st century. . Given this perspective, a number of scientists (linguists, ethnologists, engineers) agreed, joining forces and their knowledge to devise various projects in the world that could protect endangered languages. One such project is the new Rosetta Stone

Realization

The idea arose thanks to the well-known history of the ancient Rosetta stone that has been able to survive through the centuries until it was found by pure chance, but in this case without leaving the finding to chance. Scientific and historical knowledge will be obtained from the modern piece over time, which is why it is supposed to be easily accessible to future anthropologists and all languages will be written and represented in it for the information of subsequent researchers. The team for this manufacturing of the current rosetta belongs to the Long Now Foundation of the city of San Francisco, headed by Jim Mason. The support is a 7.5 cm diameter nickel disc on which microscopic images of the texts have been engraved by chemical processes and a central world map indicating the places where the different languages represented there are spoken. With a microscope of only 1000 magnification it will be possible to read perfectly.

Content

The engraved text is, in each of the languages, the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...." and for those that do not have writing, a transliteration has been made. As in this stone the content may be much greater than it was in the ancient Rosetta stone, in addition to the 27 pages of glossed texts a description has been made in English of a thousand languages.

Launch and continuity

The work and compilation for the rosetta-disk was completed in 2002 and on February 26, 2004 one of these disks was put into orbit in an Ariane-5 launch from Kourou in the French Guiana. The spaceship is 3 tons and will first be inserted into a geostationary orbit, before being sent to the Solar System. In December 2015 the spacecraft will land on a comet.

In addition, these rosetta-discs are being mass-produced, protected in steel spheres to distribute them all over the world with the idea that (even if many are lost) there will always be some left for the scholars of the future.

Linguistic research work continued during the early years of the XXI century. There is a digital database with lists of words from 4,000 to 5,000 languages, a kind of giant dictionary that will also serve to better understand the evolution of language and human migrations.