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.

Comments

Unimportant history

[Areyoukiddingme]

Human language naturally fragments. It's the way our brains work. There are more dead languages than there are live ones, and it will only get worse. Even this language we call English isn't English. Old English is so dead it can't be interpreted without training. Middle English is dead, but you can at least guess at the meaning as a modern English speaker. Eventually "modern" English will also be dead. Give it a thousand years.

Meanwhile, the history of vanished nondescript agrarian cultures is in no way important. Throughout history there have been millions, if not billions (depending on your definition of what's a human), of tiny little subsistence enclaves of humans that never did anything other than subsist. It's not bad. It's just not important. Salvaging the language recordings themselves might be useful to linguists and people studying the human brain, but it's not important history. We're just being told it's important because "Aborigines!"