Damn The Apostrophes! Full Speed Ahead!

Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh boy, yo—turns out Avatar is going to have a conlang! (Thanks, ysabetwordsmith!)

I love conlangs in movies, because I get a huge charge out of hearing people speak invented languages.* Especially actors in movies, because I like to see how well they’ve managed to make it sound natural.

It’s not easy—witness Atlantis: The Lost Empire, where the language was written by the syllable**—and a lot of the actors, including Cree Summer, clearly pronounced the hyphens. (Unless they were Leonard Nimoy, who knows his conlangs.)

This cracks me up because Mark Okrand had already written a language that neatly got around that—Klingon is the sort of language where you spit out every syllable anyway, which made it a lot easier to sound natural. And it’s not impossible that the actor will get totally into a language, like Milla Jovovich did with the “Divine Language” from the Fifth Element. So I’ll be interested to see where Avatar falls on this spectrum.

Although I would like articles about it to stop with the headline “Do You Speak [Conlang]?” Not for any particular reason except that they seem utterly compelled to use that one, and it’s getting a little old.


*Including pleasantly nutty conlangers, like the oddly-attired Gerudo Language Girl and her Youtube tutorials, or the numerous “Lord’s Prayer Inna Conlang” videos, also on Youtube, or the no-longer-online Herman Miller and his electronically altered squeaky mouse languages.

**”NEE-puk! GWEE-sit TEE-rid MEH-gid-lih-men!”