I thought unicoders might be interested in the following announcement
James
----------------------------------
James Partridge
St Edmund Hall
Oxford University
----------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wladimir Fischer" <wlado@GMX.AT>
To: <SEELANGS@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 10:37 AM
Subject: Fwd: ST-L: Fw: Call for contributions to new 1,000 Language Online
Archive
> Forwarded from LINGUIST list (http://www.linguistlist.org)
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> Announcing the launch of The Rosetta Project 1,000 Language Online
> Archive at http://www.RosettaProject.org
>
> Call for text contribution and review comments.
>
> The Rosetta Project is an attempt to create a broad corpus of language
> descriptions, vernacular texts, analytic materials and audio files for
1,000
> languages in a publicly accessible, online archive as well as on various
> extreme term storage media. The intention is to create a meaningful
> survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages as well as a
> unique platform for contemporary comparative linguistic research and
> education. For each language, we are collecting seven
> descriptive/analytic components.
>
> - Detailed descriptions
> - Glossed vernacular texts
> - Orthographies
> - Swadesh 100 word vocabulary lists
> - Inventories of phonemes
> - Morphology and Syntax sketches
> - Translations of Genesis Ch 1-3
> - Audio files with transcriptions
>
> We are creating this broad language archive through an open
> contribution, open review process, similar to the strategy that created
> the Oxford English Dictionary. Though in this case, we hope the
> Internet speeds the process a little bit. . . ;-) And to help the process
> along, we are initiating collection efforts at Stanford Berkeley, Yale and
> SIL, as well as collaborations with various scholars of comparative and
> historical linguistics.
>
> As this is an open source project (a Linux of Linguistics), we need your
> help. We call on all language specialists, whether linguist,
> anthropologist, translator or interested native speaker, to contribute
> texts or provide review comments in their languages of expertise. To
> enable this collaboration, we have created an elaborate online working
> environment at www.rosettaproject.org, offering access to all the texts in
> our database, as well as providing various tools for text review,
> annotation and discussion.
>
> To clarify, this project is not an attempt to orchestrate massive new
> research on lesser documented languages. Rather, our intention is to
> develop a powerful, well tended platform to collect, preserve and make
> available the many riches of already completed descriptive linguistic
> work- work that is often difficult to access or rotting away in
> underfunded archives or in the file cabinets of our aging colleagues.
> We are starting with the above descriptive frame for each language, but
> hope to expand the list as new datasets or texts appear that need an
> online home. We have created the navigation and search environment.
> It is now yours to fill what that which interests you.
>
> In the end, we hope this worldwide collaboration to create a new global
> "Rosetta Stone" will help draw attention to the tragedy of language
> extinction as well as speed the work to preserve what we have left of this
> critical manifestation of the human intellect.
>
> Please visit us at http://www.rosettaproject.org. We expect you will be
> pleased with what you find and hope you will join us for this very
> ambitious new initiative.
>
> Jim Mason
> Director, The Rosetta Project
> Long Now Foundation
> http://www.longnow.org
>
> --
>
> Wladimir Fischer
>
> Spengergasse 52/12
> A-1050 Wien
>
> ++43-1-5968567 (phone)
> ++43-699-11332058 (mob)
> ++49-89-1488-219546 (fax)
>
> wlado@gmx.at
>
> http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a8902625
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
> options, and more. Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
> http://members.home.net/lists/seelangs/
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:18:17 EDT