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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Tags: Constructed languages, Na'vi
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By A.J. Jacobs. Sunday, June 28, 2009
Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language
By Arika Okrent; Spiegel & Grau. 342 pp. $26
One surefire way to become aware of the absurdity of the English language is to have a kid. My 5-year-old son’s sensible linguistic assumptions are constantly butting up against the deep weirdness of our mother tongue. He tells me “I runned to the store.” He should be right. He says “no more asparaguses.” That should be correct. And what’s the opposite of “upside down?” “Upside up,” of course. As opposed to “right side up,” which is peculiar and confusing.
As Arika Okrent writes in her new book, “In the Land of Invented Languages,” “from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster.” English in particular is choked with irregular words and anachronistic phrases that long ago stopped making intuitive sense. If it were a car, it would be a jalopy patched together from a bunch of spare parts. Such is the curse of the natural language. It’s not as if French or Swahili is much more logical.
So it’s easy to understand why thousands of people over hundreds of years have tried to create a better language from scratch. Okrent’s book is a fascinating look at some of these attempts, from the well-known (Esperanto) to the obscure (Toki Pona, which “uses only positive words . . . to promote positive thinking.”) As she notes, the efforts have been mostly failures. If they are spoken at all, these languages are spoken by fringe groups, few of whom get much more respect than those Trekkie Klingon speakers. But it’s still worth learning about them, because they shed light both on the perils of idealism and on the evolution of natural language.
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Tags: Constructed languages, Esperanto
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By ROY BLOUNT Jr. Published: May 20, 2009
If language were set in concrete, there would be no call for new books on how to use it. These days, most such books are at pains not to seem prescriptive. In 1996, Patricia T. O’Conner gave us the admirably entitled “Woe Is I,” aptly subtitled “The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.” In this lucid and sensible book she criticized the use of “hopefully” to mean “It is hoped” or “I hope”: “Join the crowd and abuse ‘hopefully’ if you want; I can’t stop you. But maybe if enough of us preserve the original meaning it can be saved. One can only hope.”
Now, in “Origins of the Specious,” she says, “I’m not hopeful about convincing all the fuddy-duddies out there, but here goes: It’s hopeless to resist the evolution of ‘hopefully.’ ” So use it, she says. “Hopefully, the critics will come to their senses.”
According to how you look at it, O’Conner has turned on her fellow preservationists (“fuddy-duddies,” is it?), or she has evolved along with the language. In “Woe Is I,” she took a hard line on the difference between “disinterested” and “uninterested.” Now she says the one, generally speaking, means the other, because “as we all know, in English the majority rules. All those usage experts will eventually come around. . . . You can take a stand, use ‘disinterested’ to mean not interested, and risk being thought an illiterate nincompoop by those who don’t know any better.” You’ll note that “those who don’t know any better,” here, are the “usage experts.” That is a bit much, coming from someone who is widely regarded as a usage expert. O’Conner goes on, however, to offer characteristically good advice, which is to finesse the issue (that is, to avoid confusion) by using “impartial” instead of “disinterested” and “not interested” instead of “uninterested.”
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Tags: Constructed languages, English
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Daniel L. Everett, Special to The Chronicle. Friday, May 15, 2009
Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language
By Arika Okrent
(Spiegel & Grau; 342 pages; $26)
In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” the mad Dr. Henry Frankenstein (played by French-born actor Colin Clive) electrifies the collage of human body parts that was his “monster.” As the android creature stirs, Frankenstein famously exclaims, “It’s alive. It’s ali-ha-hive.”
I have always thought of people who tried to invent languages as about as sane and practical as the mad scientists in the movies who try to create life. Less self-destructive, perhaps. Presumably, no group of fear-crazed villagers will come to burn down your castle because they are afraid of your verb structure.
But I had missed the real interest behind created languages – what they have to tell us about the evolved communication systems, natural languages, that all humans speak. In her new book, “In the Land of Invented Languages,” Arika Okrent enlivens the enterprise of language invention and takes the reader on an illuminating and highly entertaining tour of human folly and brilliance, pointing out at various places the shortcomings of both natural and invented languages as communicative systems.
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Tags: Constructed languages
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