Tim Lammers, Staff Writer. POSTED: Thursday, April 22, 2010

As University of Southern California Marshall Professor Paul Frommer has discovered, playing a pivotal role in the making of the highest-grossing film history does have its advantages. And as the creator of the language used by the Na’vi alien humanoids, Frommer said he’s fortunate enough to still be walking the talk as the blockbuster film makes its debut on home video.

In an @ The Movies interview this week, Frommer said that he first learned of “Avatar” in the summer of 2005 when writer-director-producer James Cameron’s production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, sent an e-mail to the linguistics department at USC, searching for somebody to help develop the language for the Na’vi. Oddly enough, linguistics is not Frommer’s department — he teaches business — but had previously earned a linguistics degree from the university. And after being recommended by a colleague and friend in the department, Frommer said he jumped on the chance and got the job.

“I didn’t have to start at absolute zero because Jim came up with about 30 words on his own,” Frommer recalled. “He had the words in his ‘script-ment’ — which is something halfway between a treatment and script. He had names of characters and animals and things like that, so it gave me a bit of a context of the kind of sound he had in his mind.”

From there, Frommer said, Cameron gave him leeway to develop it in a way he thought was natural.

“In discussing it with him early on, his only direction really was, ‘Make it sound appealing, and make it a consistent language with complete grammar and a complete sound system.
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