Slashdot Mirror
78 Indigenous Languages Are Being Saved By Optical Scanning Tech (fastcompany.com)
Researchers at UC Berkeley are using futuristic technology to save a piece of the past. From a report: Project IRENE is using cutting-edge optical scan technology to transfer and digitally restore recordings of indigenous languages, many of which no longer have living speakers, Hyperallergic first reported. The recordings were gathered between 1900 and 1938 when UC anthropologists asked native speakers of 78 indigenous languages of California to record their songs, histories, prayers, and vocabulary on wax cylinders. Many of those cylinders are housed at Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and they are in a state of disrepair, degraded and broken. It's a frustrating state of affairs, as many of the languages recorded on the cylinders have fallen out of use or are no longer spoken at all. The "Documenting Endangered Languages" initiative, which has support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is hoping to save this important history.
I hope COBOL is in there somewhere.
It does for idiot millenials who think making a copy of something is a lifetime accomplishment lol
The Postmodernists were a briefly popular academic cult whose polysyllabic but totally non-referential coined language, though impenetrable to outsiders, once dominated at liberal arts schools and was the written language of numerous papers.
Because the Pomo tribe has been exclusively vegan and abstains from heterosexual relationships it has been unable to pass on its culture to new generations, so its numbers have been steadily declining in recent years as older tenured chieftains die off. Today, native speakers are confined to a few small campuses in northern California.