Bodies With Lots to SayWritten by John Sheridan
Bodies With Lots to Say.I once read somewhere that at least 90% of language is non-verbal. How do we communicate then if only 10% of a language is actually spoken? The simple answer is body language. In general day-to-day life we are constantly reading other people's body language. From just walking along a street and looking at passers by, we ascertain whether someone is friendly, hostile, approachable, standoffish or just indifferent. All this information is gathered and assessed subconsciously and without uttering a word. Have you ever been in a room a shop or a park for example and spotted someone you took an instant dislike to? You don't know person, you've never seen them before, yet as soon as you looked at them they irritated and annoyed you. You didn't like what you saw but you are totally unaware of reason for this feeling. The object of your irritation could be extremely attractive to lots of other people in terms of personality, looks and general demeanour, but to you - well you've already decided that you just don't like them but you don't know why. The answer is simply that their body language is incompatible with your own. This is no-one's fault; it's just one of those quirky things that happen from time to time. The point is that all this information has subconsciously been gathered, analysed, assessed and a decision made without a word being exchanged.
| | Communicating the World in Three Inches: The Rosetta Project Works to Build Archive of 1,000 LanguagesWritten by Jeannette Balleza
The Rosetta Project is a worldwide endeavor to produce an updated version of famous Rosetta Stone from 100 BC. Some of Napoleon's troops discovered Rosetta Stone in Rashid, Egypt, in 1799. They found inscribed upon granite slab three parallel translations of a certain decree in Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek. Using Greek text, experts of 1800s were able to decipher previously elusive Hieroglyphic script.Language specialists and native speakers from around globe are joining forces to build an archive of 1,000 languages to be micro-etched onto 27,000 data pages on Rosetta Disk, a 3'' nickel disk with a life expectancy of 2,000 years. The Rosetta Project is collecting following information for every language: * Detailed Descriptions: Origins, histories and other relevant statistics. * Genesis Translations: Chapters 1-3. * Glossed Vernacular Texts: Cultural stories contrasting with Genesis text accompanied by grammatical analysis. * Orthographies: Written letters/symbols as well as pronunciation keys. * Swadesh Word Lists: Essential lists of common words. * Inventories of Phenomes: Fundamental sound units. * Audio Files: Spoken samples with transcriptions. The Long Now Foundation began Rosetta Project with funding from Lazy Eight Foundation to address disconcerting prediction that 50-90% of world's languages will disappear within next century with little documentation. The project's mission is to provide a definitive resource for comparative linguistic research and education, to preserve a meaningful survey of human languages for future decipherment and recovery of lost languages as well as to create an aesthetic object representative of world's linguistic diversity.
|
