The Rosetta Disk<\/a> is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation<\/a>‘s 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.
\nThe Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: \u201cLanguages of the World<\/a>: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language<\/a> documentation.\u201d The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it\u2014\u2018get a magnifier and there is more.\u2019
\nOn the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image<\/a>, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification<\/a>. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
\nThe 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data\u2014descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems<\/a> and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a \u201cSwadesh List<\/a>\u201d), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis<\/a> or the UN Declaration of Human Rights<\/a>.
\nvia Concept \u2014<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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