linguistics

How fun! The language constructed especially for the movie "Avatar" has fun and cool support on the web.

If you've ever wanted to create your own language, you might want to see how Paul Frommer, a professor at USC with a doctorate in linguistics, built Na'vi. Check out these sites:

Learn Na'vi

http://www.learnnavi.org/
An active forum plus a cool downloadable PDF of "The Na'vi Pocket Guide."

http://wiki.learnnavi.org/
A wiki, related to the learnnavi.org site, with even more on the Na'vi language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%27vi_language
This Wikipedia page has a summary of the structure and grammar of Na'vi. Not much in the way of vocabulary, though.

Benjamin Zimmer has this post, Some highlights of Na'vi, on the Language Log at the University of Pennsylvania.

Na'vi has tongue clicks (the 'x' character) as well as some tricky consonant combinations to practice. I wonder when there will be Skype calls and Second Life spots to practice Na'vi in voice! (When I find them, I'll post about them here.)

You can hear movie characters and Dr. Frommer speaking Na'vi on the NPR December 15, 2009 episode of Morning Edition feature, "Do You Speak Na'vi? Giving Voice To 'Avatar' Aliens."

About Paul Frommer

Paul Frommer created the Na'vi language according to the requirements of director James Cameron: it should not be like any common Earth language, it should be easy for the actors to speak and learn, and it should be grounded in the background of a people who live in nature and network with nature in a deep way.

The UNIDENTIFIED SOUND OBJECT blog has this interview with Paul Frommer, with a picture of Dr. Frommer. It also includes the story of how Lightstorm Entertainment - James Cameron's production company - connected with Dr. Frommer for the project. Thanks for the interview, Matteo from Project U.S.O.!

On his blog, "Our time to act," Joe Gerstandt asks some great questions. Huge questions. Questions that interest me and that are topical to this blog, so I'll respond to them here.

Joe asks (at the end of his blog post titled "The Direction a Community Chooses"):

How do you change a community conversation?

Glossopoeia: A planned or constructed language—known colloquially or informally as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary have been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally. (from the wikipedia entry)

Teaching the ancient Biblical Hebrew language through study of the ancient Hebrew alphabet, culture and philosophy.

Free Hebrew lessons and email support!
Founded by Jeff Benner, who also is an author of several books on ancient Hebrew and an ancient Hebrew dictionary.

Well done video with exceptions, vowels and all letter names.

By YouTube user jewfaq, who is also curator of the web site Judaism 101.

Learn Hebrew for FREE!

Hebrew basics, grammar, blessings & prayers, meditations and much more. Extensive site.

Found via cool site Omniglot:

Graeme Kilshaw has used visual binary, which was created in 1950's by Bell Labs, to represent a cool symbolic alphabet in combination with an interface device design called the Visual Binary Cube Alphabet. This is an elegant design: it is compact, useful, binary-friendly (digital friendly), and even mimics the shape of the human mouth when speaking the vowels and letters in many cases. And, it looks like an alien-future-sci-fi alphabet - and makes a very cool code. Neato!

A terrific site with loads of information mapping the languages, alphabets, syllabaries (phonetic writing systems consisting of symbols representing syllables) and more... even has constructed alphabets and scripts! (con-scripts)

Puzzles (real-life, ancient writings, and more cool stuff)
Huge Links section (language-specific, fonts, linguistics, learning languages, writing names and much more!)

I want to thank Arika Okrent for her book "In the Land of Invented Languages" and her chapters on Lojban. Not only does she do a nice job summarizing the history of it, she also presents the "theory" behind it - how Lojban is based on a structure that is similar to function calls in computer code, built on the idea that language can express equations, or at least information about our world and perceptions in an equation-like form that precisely maps the relationships of objects.

Pp.198-252 in Arika's book gave me exactly the overview I was looking for about Lojban. One of the coolest thing I learned was about how Lojban enthusiasts enthusiastically embrace the task of improving Lojban with nifty features as they are discovered in other languages. Arika gives the example of how using evidential markers (indicating how the speaker knows his statement is true) for each sentence caused a stir of excited activity as Lojban core fans jumped into configuring that ability into Lojban. They were even so polite as to ask Suzette Haden Elgin, the creator of Láadan, if it was okay with her that they did so. She was okay with it.

I also like the way Arika talks about language creating culture - even if unintended (Lojban has a goal of being as culture-nuetral as possible). The Lojban culture is growing richer every passing year. I wonder how much of a language's success, adoption and "liveliness" is directly due to the cultural development in that language. A neat concept to ponder; a sort of tangent from the Worfian Hypothesis, eh?

o - o - o

So, kudos and thanks for writing "In the Land of Invented Languages," Arika. Great research and data. I recommend it to fans of language and linguists, both professional and hobbyists. Oh, and thanks for the list of 500 created languages, both in the book and on the book web site!

Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns by running computer analysis on many thousands of emails and historical documents. Neat.

His book, "The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us" comes out on Aug 23 (2011), and there is a Kindle version, too.