I haven’t been to see Avatar and I don’t suppose I shall, but I have just learnt how to say ‘Hello’ to a Na’vi in his own language. It is Kaltxì. The difficult bit is the consonant spelled tx, which is an ejective.
I don’t want to go on about phonetics, because it is fearfully confusing without hearing the sounds. The much-derided Wikipedia has useful little recordings of the sound made by an ejective p, t, k, q and s. Anyway, ejective consonants, pronounced with a closed glottis, are not to be confused with clicks or indeed implosives.
In learning a new language, sounds such as these are jolly well the ones to learn first, or you’ll never get them, and you will remain lamely like an Englishman who cannot pronounce the Spanish jota (as in Juan, which is not ‘Wan’, whatever the radio sports reporters suggest). Ejective consonants are handy not only in talking to 10ft blue aliens, but in speaking about 20 per cent of the earth’s languages — though not any that I’ve tried.
The Na’vi language has been invented for the film by an American, Professor Paul Frommer. He has so far come up with a basic vocabulary of 1,000 words. The phonology was the least of his problems, though he decided to scatter a few oddities to make it sound alien, such as initial consonant clusters like fp and sr. He decided that verbs should change according to tense and aspect (the difference between I walk and I am walking), and be modified not by suffixes or prefixes but by infixes in a root. The root for ‘hunt’ is taron, and ‘hunted’ is tolaron, with the infix -ol-.
This is very pleasing, as far as it goes. Larger questions lie ahead. Compare Na’vi with the language Klingon, developed since its appearance in Star Trek. Shakespeare is said to have been translated into Klingon (Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing are on Amazon). But it seems to me that the phonology of Klingon is unsatisfactory in deliberately selecting consonants that are unfamiliar to English-speakers and are not grouped in contrasting pairs, as with many earthly languages. More importantly, the vocabulary seems arbitrary.
Here we come to the nub of an invented language: the etymology. Derivations suggest a culture, which is what languages are about. J.R.R. Tolkien knew this very well. His main interest in the languages that he invented, such as Quenya and Sindarin, was in their histories — how they changed in morphology and semantics. This would occupy Professor Frommer for a lifetime.
Comments