Fantasist’s Scroll

A “do-it-yourself” Rosetta stone!

For those of you who are already familiar with my conlang resources, you know that they’re mostly based on scripts originally written by Chris Pound. Well, one of the scripts he wrote was to automatically transliterate a text into a more or less realistic conlang text that’s generated on the fly. Sounds fun, right? Well, now you can do it on the web with Fantasist.net’s Rosetta Stone Game! Using the same principles and source files as the Conlang Word Generator and the Name Maker, you can make your very own, original Rosetta Stone to “decrypt”.

Okay, so maybe this is only fun for linguistics and conlang geeks, but still, it’s Friday, so lighten up and have fun with it.

The Rosetta Project is really rolling now.

I first read about this in a news story in Wired. Their goal is to create a permanent, or near permanent record of dying languages. Their goal is to preserve at least a thousand of the roughly 7,000 languages on the planet. They expect more than 80% of those languages to die out due to globalization and modernization. What Wired talked about was the method they plan to use for preservation. Somewhat suprisingly, they don’t plan to use a computer-based technology. Rather, they’re going with a low-tech, but durable and easy to use, disk etched with examples of the same text in all 1,000 languages, just like the famous Rosetta Stone that allowed us to dechiper ancient Egyptian. (The text, incidentally, is the first book of the Bible, Genesis.)

But, what interests me the most is the on-line language search engine and the Comparative Word List Generator. With this bad-boy a person can generate lists, or tables, of the translations for the 207 most widely used and important words in language. Now, not every language listed has this table compiled, but the major languages all do and quite a few of the less major languages do, too. In any case, it sure is cool to play with when thinking about creating a language. Shoot, they even have grammars and phonologies and orthographies for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of languages. It’s well worth checking out!