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

Re:The purpose of language is to communicate

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't it worth spending money on? Once those language are gone, they're gone forever. If for some reason knowing the language becomes important, it's too late. Plus, the more we know about one language or another, the more opportunities there are for linguists to understand how languages work.

This whole attitude about how it needs to be immediately of some commercial value is disgusting and it's literally killing America, why on Earth are you going to let it do the same thing to Canada?