Silver screen aliens and their language

To lend extraauthenticity to the Na'vi - the tall, blue-skinned , vaguely feline humanoidsliving on the distant world of Pandora - Cameron enlisted the help of a linguistto construct a full-fledged language, with its own peculiar phonetics, lexiconand syntax. From the mind of Paul Frommer, a professor at the University ofSouthern California, was born a Na'vi language, with mellifluous vowel clusters,popping ejectives and a grammatical system elaborate enough to make a polyglotblush. Why go to all the trouble? Do audiences really care if aliens on the silver screen are speaking in well-formed sentences? When the extraterrestrial visitor Klaatu barked orders to his robot companion Gort in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still nobody was too concerned about such linguistic niceties. Even with the Star Wars films, few moviegoers objected to the jabbering of the various alien races, which never amounted to more than a sonic pastiche. The films' sound designer, Ben Burtt, often just manipulated bits of audio from different human languages for the nonhumans to mouth: some Quechua from South America for the bounty hunter Greedo, some Haya from Tanzania for Lando Calrissian's odd little co-pilot , Nien Nunb. Amongdiscerning science-fiction movie fans, however, expectations are moresophisticated now when it comes to alien tongues, and for that we have theBerkeley-trained linguist Marc Okrand to thank. Okrand worked as a consultant onthe Star Trek films, and his crowning glory is the development of Klingon, themost fully realised sciencefiction language devised thus far. I asked Okrandrecently about the legacy of Klingon, and he was modest about hisaccomplishments. He wasn't the first academic linguist brought on board for sucha project, he explained - that honour most likely goes to Victoria Fromkin, aUCLA professor who fashioned a language for the ape-like Pakuni creatures on the1970s children's TV series Land of the Lost. Okrand also spoke admiringly of theprehistoric languages that Anthony Burgess created for the movie Quest for Firein 1981. But it was Okrand's invention of Klingon, beginning with Star Trek IIIin 1984, that set the standard for cinematic xenolinguistics.Working from a handful of Klingon lines that James Doohan (the actorwho played Scotty) came up with for the first Star Trek movie, Okrand concocteda rich, internally consistent language, with a dictionary that has sold morethan 300,000 copies. In her entertaining new book, In the Land of InventedLanguages, Arika Okrent details how the rise of Klingon has spawned a passionatesubculture of fans versed in the language. Now the guttural sounds of Klingoncan be heard in everything from a coming opera by the Klingon Terran ResearchEnsemble in the Netherlands to YouTube videos of the inimitable Klenginem, aTrekkie who performs Eminem's rap songs in Klingon translation.Cameron clearly had Klingon in mind when he began envisioning thelinguistic landscape of Avatar. About three years ago, he hyped Frommer'sdevelopment of the Na'vi language by boasting to Entertainment Weekly that itwould "out-Klingon Klingon." Frommer now dismisses this as a bit of Cameronianhyperbole, assuring me that he has nothing but respect for Okrand's masterwork .In fact, Frommer got the Avatar assignment in part on the strength of his workon Looking at Languages, an elementary linguistics workbook that includes astudent exercise in deciphering Klingon word order. (Klingon follows the unusualobject-verb-subject ordering.) While Frommer was working out thestructure of Na'vi in 2005 and 2006, however, he studiously avoided looking atKlingon or any other constructed language (or "conlang" for short). Instead hedrew on his mentor Bernard Comrie's work on linguistic typology and his ownwide-ranging study of languages as diverse as Persian, Malay, Hebrew andMandarin Chinese. The most exotic items in the Na'vi sound system are threeejectives - kx, px and tx - that require explosive bursts of breath. They comein handy for such piquant epithets as skxawng, loosely translated as "moron,"which became a popular put-down among crew members during production.Like Klingon, Na'vi needed to be exotic enough for audiences torecognise its alienness but not so exotic that it was beyond the ability ofhuman actors to articulate . Despite the muchheralded visual effects of Avatar,Cameron insisted that the sounds of Na'vi speech remain unmanipulated. What'smore, the film depicts human characters with varying proficiency in Na'vi . SamWorthington as Jake Sully must learn the language when he is projected intoalien form to go undercover on Pandora. Meanwhile, an experienced botanist(Sigourney Weaver) schools an eager young scientist (Joel David Moore) in thefiner points of conversational Na'vi . It is in these linguistically credibleinteractions that Avatar may make its biggest contribution to science fiction.In her foreword to The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages, UrsulaK Le Guin mocked the conventions of pulp sci-fi perpetuated by films like theStar Wars franchise: "the permanent hegemony of manly, English-speaking men, therisible grotesqueness of non-English languages and the inviolable rule thatpretty women have musical names ending in 'a.'" The linguist Harold F. Schiffmanhas similarly noted that alien languages in films are primarily designed to"confuse and amuse," with little or no attention paid to the nuances ofcross-linguistic communication. Our sci-fi heroes may still be buff Englishspeakers, but a little sensitivity across the human-alien divide could help themseem less like skxawngs. NYT.