How do you say "You rock!" in Yurok
August 9, 2017 5:37 PM   Subscribe

August 8 is International Indigenous Peoples Day. To celebrate, UC Berkeley highlighted a project to preserve rare audio of 78 indigenous California languages that uses optics technology to copy content from decaying wax cylinders in a non-invasive way.
Berkeley researchers are using optical scan technology to transfer recordings from thousands of decaying wax cylinders, preserving audio of 78 indigenous California languages, most of which were recorded more than a century ago. Many of the recordings contain the only audio in the world of several of the languages, and others hold unknown stories and songs.

The collection will be made available to indigenous communities, as well as to scholars and the public.
The video in the link has interviews with the linguistics and physics researchers, an archive specialist, and a descendant of a tribe that has no surviving "old-timer" speakers to teach the language.

See also the blurb from the National Science Foundation website.
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld (4 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Fantastic stuff, thank you for posting this.
posted by spitbull at 5:44 PM on August 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


Thank you! Go Bears, and Go Yurok!
posted by The Toad at 7:10 PM on August 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


Very cool, thanks for sharing!
posted by scrubjay at 7:41 PM on August 9, 2017


One of the main people in this project was my grad school advisor, and we once made him a T-shirt that said YU ROK!
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 11:17 AM on August 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


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