Watching Avatar on TV

[catsidhe]

They hired some biologists for this, didn't they.

They also hired some linguists.

What does it say that I can watch this, and come out with grammar. (Na'Vi means "The People", and one of the first things I hear is Na'Vi'a, which is obviously the vocative case, and I wonder if Na' is the definite article.)

And yet... maybe they did too good a job. Because I notice patterns. The Na'Vi language is human... it can be pronounced by a human throat, it contains no alien sounds, no alien combinations, from the sounds of it a fairly normal human grammar. (It doesn't seem as alien as Klingon, or even Sindarin, for that matter.)

And then there are the Na'Vi themselves. There is a pattern with the body pattern: they are hexapedal, quad-ocular, their nostril analogues are where the chest and neck meet. And this is regular. Even the flying creatures have two sets of wings and a pair of legs.

Except the Na'Vi.

Are they mammals? The women have breasts. Or at least fleshy bumps in the right place. They have nostrils in the Earth-normal place. They have four limbs, and no signs of an even vestigial third pair. They gesture with their hands. They cover their groins. They smile and laugh like apes. And they have human teeth when they do.

They're tall blue monkeys.

And yet they have that neural connection tail thing. All I can wonder is if they are ret-connable as genetic constructs in the first place.

Because all the efforts they went to to make it biologically plausible combine with the necessities of making protagonists humanoid enough to empathise with to almost make it worse than if they hadn't gone to all that trouble.


That's not even going into all the "Corporations would burn the world for a profit", "Savage natives can only be saved by the Great White Hero" competing plots, pissing off the Left and the Right in almost equal measure.


But all that aside, it sure is very, very pretty.

Comments

[actreal]

You're right. They did hire linguists and it is based on human languages, if less common ones. More details here:

http://www.learnnavi.org/

[catsidhe]

Yes, I found that site this morning. (A bit late last night.)

I was pleased to note that I was correct about a scene where Neytiri is teaching Jake to speak Na'vi (That is: r is realised as a flap, not a rho or trill, but Jake heard [d] instead of [ɾ], as he was expecting [ɚ] or [r] -- the former not being a phoneme in Na'vi, the latter being the phonemically distinct "rr"), and in the Na'vi wikibook, there is The vocative

Na’vi does not have a case suffix for nouns used to address someone, a function called the vocative, but instead use a particle ma, which occurs before the name or term of address: Ma Neytiri, herahaw srak? "Neytiri, are you sleeping?", rather like archaic or poetic "O!" in English. It occurs before the noun phrase, and is never suffixed: Ma oeyä ’eylan! "My friend!"; ma smukan sì smuke "O brothers and sisters", ftu oe neto rikx, ma skxawng! "Get away from me, moron!".

Ma is obligatory with people and Eywa (God), but optional with animals. For example, it is used ceremonially with animals one has killed in a hunt, but may be omitted when talking to one's pa’li (horse). It may thus indicate a degree of politeness vs. intimacy.

With collective nouns, such Na’vi "the People" and tsampongu "war party", in which the singular form is used for multiple people, a collective vocative suffix -ya is found as an alternative for ma: Mawey, na’viya, mawey! "Calm, people, calm!"; frapoya! "(hey) everybody!".

And it's that "-ya" for the collective vocative suffix which I picked up (although I heard the [j] as [ʔ])

Still, even knowing the phonology and grammar, it's based heavily on Amerind languages, as far as I can tell, only far less alien (to Indo-European minds) than Athabaskan or Lakota.

Ergative, ditransitive, trial number, lenition, infix declension, ejective plosives and syllabic approximants, none of these characteristics are in any way alien. No [%] double glottal stops (per the Karrank% in the Uplift Series), not even [µ] (being the nasalised version of the bilabial voiced fricative [β], as seen commonly in Old Irish -- eg, "Nemed" [ne:.µeð]).


Am I being overly nit-picking-y?

[actreal]

It's a balance between making the language alien but easy enough to teach to actors (who presumably have no previous linguistic education) that they can sound like natives.

I think it's worthy of respect that James Cameron even bothered to talk to linguists at all, let alone have a whole language created rather than just making up a few phrases with no conistent grammar.

[catsidhe]

Oh no, I get that. (Although they taught the actors well enough for Zoe Saldana to be able to pronounce [ɾ] as opposed to [d], and sound natural doing so.)

But all the sounds were human. There were no glottal sibilants, no trilled nasals or nasal fricative, not even a glottal trill.

They didn't even put effects on the Na'vi voices: no recognition of the effects of a larger chest in a different gas mix on tenor and timbre. Not even a hint of flange.

Don't get me wrong, the Na'vi language is an achievement, and the details of the grammar and phonology are interesting enough to be getting on with, but there is nothing to my knowledge which is not attested on Earth (even the trial number, though it is vanishing rare).

I get why they did it, for the same reason the vegetation was (mostly) green: I read that they tried a purple vegetative palette, and it looked so alien as to be unrecognisable and distracting.

And yet they put so much effort into the blue alien bodies, and the bioluminescence, surely a little flange in post production couldn't have hurt that much?

I know, I'm being picky over trifles. It's what I do.

I think it's worthy of respect that James Cameron even bothered to talk to linguists at all, ...

I agree. But then, this is James Cameron...

Before production began, he took dives to the bottom of the Atlantic and shot actual footage of the ship underwater, which he inserted into the final film. Much of the film's dialogue was also written during these dives.

On March 7, 2012, Cameron took the Deepsea Challenger submersible to the bottom of the New Britain Trench in a five-mile-deep solo dive. On March 26, 2012, Cameron reached the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. He spent more than three hours exploring the ocean floor before returning to the surface. Cameron is the first person to accomplish the trip solo.

Merely commissioning a language ab novo is small fry in comparison.