Carved
in 196 BC in Egyptian and Greek using hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek scripts, the
Rosetta Stone
has helped the modern world unlock some of the mysteries of ancient Egypt.
Named after the village of Rosetta (or Rashid), where it was first discovered by French soldiers in 1799, its inscriptions are tributes of a council of priests to a 13-year-old pharaoh, Ptolemy V Epiphanes.
After years of arduous study and careful comparison with other surviving samples of Egyptian writing, French researcher Jean-François Champollion managed to decipher the hieroglyphs in 1822. The language of one of the great ancient civilizations was thereby saved for posterity.
Now our modern-day researchers are warning that anything between 50 and 90 per cent of the world's 6,800 or so remaining languages could die out within the next century. Two decades ago, a growing sense of urgency led The Long Now Foundation to embark on an ambitious project to safeguard basic documentation of as many of today's languages as possible for 10,000 years into the future. This it aimed to achieve by recording sufficient data for at least token representation of each language on an "extreme longevity nickel disk" to be mounted in a robust but aesthetically pleasing spherical container. It was envisaged that a large number of these "Rosetta Disks" would eventually be held by key institutions and project members around the world, and anyone else willing to look after a copy.
According to information previously gathered, the Rosetta Project is to be complemented by a "single-volume monumental reference book," as well as an online database into which the public is invited to submit the following seven items deemed by the foundation to be of greatest value to future researchers:
- Detailed language descriptions (origin, number of speakers, distribution, etc.)
- Translations of chapters 1–3 of the Book of Genesis (because these are thought to be the most widely and carefully translated texts in the world)
- Culturally specific glossed vernacular texts with grammar analysis
- Orthography and pronunciation guides
- Core vocabulary lists
- Phoneme inventories
- Audio files
The Rosetta Project has come a long way with its online database. It now purports to be the largest collection of linguistic data on the Internet, providing lasting documentation of some 1,500 languages.
