Archive of working notes
Research notes, essays, and working papers from the Lingua research line, retained as part of the PureTensor archive.
Sound Before Silence: How Audio Archives Are Preserving the World’s Tonal and Oral Languages
Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today, a significant proportion have never been written down. They exist only in the mouths and ears of their speakers — in conversation, in song, in the stories told at nig…
Cracking the Code: How Computational Methods Are Deciphering the World’s Last Undecoded Scripts
For most of recorded history, the decipherment of ancient scripts has been a fundamentally human endeavour — part intuition, part obsessive pattern recognition, part luck. Michael Ventris spent years working on Linear B…
The Unheard Languages: Why Endangered Sign Languages Matter
When we talk about endangered languages, the conversation almost always centres on spoken words — the fading voices of elderly speakers, the unwritten grammars of remote communities, the oral traditions that die when the…
Language Nests: How Immersion Schools Are Creating New Generations of Speakers
In a small classroom on the Big Island of Hawai’i, a three-year-old greets her teacher entirely in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi — the Hawaiian language. Her parents don’t speak it. Her grandparents don’t speak it. But she does, becaus…
One Language Dies Every Two Weeks: Inside the Global Extinction Crisis
Somewhere in the world, a language is falling silent. Not with a dramatic last word or a ceremonial farewell, but quietly — in the gap between an elderly grandmother who dreams in her mother tongue and grandchildren who…
The Race Against Silence: How AI Is Rescuing Endangered Languages
A language dies roughly every two weeks. With nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages at risk of vanishing within a generation, linguists and technologists are locked in an unprecedented race against time. But a new a…
Reimagining Epigraphy and Language Preservation: Aeneas and Nesdia’s Holistic Approach
The survival of human languages and the manuscripts that record them is not just a matter of cultural pride. It is a race against the erosion of knowledge itself. Linguists estimate that roughly 31,000 languages have exi…
The Vital Link: How Language Preserves Blackfeet Culture
In an era where globalization threatens indigenous traditions, the Blackfeet people of Montana face a profound challenge: safeguarding their language as the cornerstone of their cultural identity. A groundbreaking 1999 s…
Global Language Extinction: Historical Trends and Consequences
Languages have been disappearing for centuries, but the pace of language extinction has accelerated in recent history. Linguists estimate that roughly 31,000 languages have existed throughout human history, yet only abou…