{"id":466727,"date":"2010-03-24T13:07:44","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T17:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2205"},"modified":"2010-03-24T13:07:44","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T17:07:44","slug":"how-language-log-helped-jump-start-a-subculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/466727","title":{"rendered":"How Language Log helped jump-start a subculture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arika Okrent, author of the wonderful book In the Land of Invented Languages<\/a><\/em>, has a new article on Slate<\/a> about the burgeoning community of Avatar<\/em> fans who have become obsessed with the movie’s alien language, Na’vi. Before the movie was released, I had gotten to know the creator of the language, Paul Frommer, for a New York Times Magazine<\/em> column<\/a> I wrote about Na’vi and other cinematic sci-fi languages. At my request, Paul was then kind enough to write up a Language Log guest post, “Some highlights of Na\u2019vi<\/a>,” just in time for Avatar<\/em>‘s opening weekend. As Arika tells it in the Slate piece, that guest post and its comments section played a key role in the emergent subculture of linguistically engaged Na’vi-philes.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Twenty-four hours after Avatar appeared in theaters, the Web site Language Log was teeming with comments about Na’vi, the alien tongue spoken in the film. The site is always lively, but it was especially so that day because Paul Frommer\u2014who created the language\u2014had shown up to discuss Na’vi syntax and phonetics. His fans were asking questions. How to say “I don’t speak Na’vi” or “I love you,” for example. An especially ambitious commenter named “Prrton” even posted a lengthy statement in the new language:<\/span><\/p>\n

“Ngaru \u00e4tx\u00e4le \u2026 oel set futa Hal’liwutta tsayeyktanru ngal peng futa l\u00ec’fyati Na’viy\u00e4 nume nereeiu a ngey\u00e4 wotxa l\u00ec’ut\u00ect\u00e4ftxurenu s\u00ec ayl\u00ec’uy\u00e4 s\u00e4numeti per\u00e4ngey ayoel. Ayoel nereu a tsa’u ke tsay\u00e4ngun lu txo ayoel p\u00e4nut\u00ecng futa rawketi sayi n\u00ecwotx ulte Eywafa ke txayey. Kawkrr!!;-) Eywa ngahu.” <\/span><\/p>\n

Or, in English:<\/span><\/p>\n

“I now ask you to tell the Hollywood bosses [Hal’liwutta tsayeyktanru] that those of us who want to learn the Na’vi language are waiting (impatiently) for your full grammar and lexicon. We promise to raise a lotta hell if what we want is not forthcoming, and ‘by Eywa’ we wont stop. Ever!! ;-)”<\/span><\/p>\n

Prrton\u2014a California consultant who goes by Britton Watkins in the real world\u2014is clearly a little unusual. But not because he’s an Avatar obsessive (there are lots of those). He’s unusual in that he formulated a paragraph in Na’vi without a grammar or dictionary. And he didn’t just stick a few words from the movie into random order or repeat lines that had occurred in the film. He produced an original and grammatically correct statement.<\/span><\/p>\n

As further evidence of the ravenous popular interest in Na’vi and other invented languages like Klingon, check out the exhaustive Q&A that Paul and Arika recently conducted on the New York Times<\/em> blog Schott’s Vocab<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arika Okrent, author of the wonderful book In the Land of Invented Languages, has a new article on Slate about the burgeoning community of Avatar fans who have become obsessed with the movie’s alien language, Na’vi. Before the movie was released, I had gotten to know the creator of the language, Paul Frommer, for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-466727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}