The Rosetta Project is into “very long term archiving”, making physical archives of human language that are intended to survive for thousands of years. The Rosetta Disk had 13,000 pages in over 1,500 language. They’ve now launchaed a smaller disk, with the archive microscopically formed in nickel and readable with
optical magnification, and it’s only about 2cm in diameter. It could be yours for a grand.
This wearable version, like the original Rosetta Disk has two sides. One
side has instructions in eight different languages and scripts (Bahasa
Indonesia, English, Hindi, Mandarin, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish,
Swahili, and Russian). The instructions translate into English as
“Languages of the world: This is an archive of over 1,000 human
languages assembled in the year 02016 C.E. Magnify 100 times to find
over 1,000 pages of language documentation.” Each instruction starts at a
human-eye readable size, and then spirals inward around a globe
graphic, ending at the microcopic scale. This indicates to the reader
“find something to magnify this with, and there is more.”
The other side of the pendant contains the archive, with over 1,000 microscopic pages.
The archive includes:
The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (327 languages)
Swadesh vocabulary lists assembled by the PanLex Project (719 languages)
