#creator: paul frommer

[dedalvs]

Kopikon - September 23rd - Georgetown

Kopikon is coming to Georgetown University, September 23rd! We have a ton of fantastic conlang presenters, and a few spots are still available! If you're interested in registering, go here:

Our presenters are:

David J. Peterson: Creator of Dothraki, Valyrian (Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon), and Trigedasleng (The 100)

Jessie Sams: Creator of Ts'íts'àsh (Elemental), Méníshè (Motherland: Fort Salem), and Aazh Naamori (Vampire Academy)

Mark Okrand: Creator of Klingon (Star Trek) and Atlantean (Atlantis)

Paul Frommer: Creator of Na'vi (Avatar)

Carl Buck: Creator of Sangheili (Halo)

Biblaridion: From his self-named YouTube channel

John Quijada: Creator of Ithkuil

Sally Caves: Creator of Teonaht and the character Reginald Barclay

Sylvia Sotomayor: Creator of Kēlen

We've also got a musical performance from the incredible duo Jillian and Andrew Aversa.

We'd love to see you there!

[conlangery]

Premiering NOW! My interview with Paul Frommer, the creator of Na'vi.

[little-box-of-autism]

Resources for Avatar Writers/Creators

Here is a list of some helpful resources for writers/creators in the Avatar Fandom

Tirea Na'vi Name Generator

Learn Na'vi - Numbers

Learn Na'vi - Phonetics

Learn Na'vi - Grammar

Learn Na'vi - Phrases

Learn Na'vi - Vocab

Paul Frommer's Blog (creator of Na'vi Language)

Online Na'vi Dictionary

(Alt) Online Na'vi Dictionary

[nattikay]

😹😹😹 they’re such dorks, I love them so much!!

…buuuuuuut as a Na'vi language nerd, especially after seeing the “debate” about it in the comments, I do feel very much obligated to say that this video’s usage of ma is incorrect.

The word ma is what linguists call a vocative marker. It’s a particle used before a name when addressing someone directly; you can think of it kinda like a verbal version of an @ in a chatroom.

Yes, Neytiri does say “ma Jake” several times in the movies, but if you go back and look at each time she does, you’ll notice that she only says it when talking directly to Jake, not when talking about him to someone else.

✅ Ma Jake, where did you go? <- This is correct use of ma! ❌ Hey Grace, did you see where ma Jake went? <- this is incorrect use of ma! ✅ Ma Grace, did you see where Jake went? <- This is also correct use of ma! Remember, ma is used for the person you are talking to, never for a third person you are talking about

and listen. I absolutely adore Jeytiri, they are 100% my favorite ship in this franchise. So I completely understand why Jeytiri shippers who haven’t studied Na'vi would want to latch onto “ma Jake” as a super cute affectionate thing that Neytiri does just for Jake, and am very sorry to have to burst that bubble, but…well, it’s not 😅

Addressing someone with ma is standard when speaking Na'vi; it’s done for everyone regardless of relationship, and doesn’t really have any romantic or affectionate significance. It’s not a special Jake-and-Neytiri pet name, it’s just basic Na'vi grammar that Neytiri sometimes slips into out of habit when speaking English (sorry) 😅

…or hey, if you don’t want to take my word for it, here’s a lesson with Paul Frommer himself (creator of the language!) where he explains it (among other things)! 😁

Neytiri being down bad for Jake while he tames his ikran for 1 minute and 7 seconds

[afactaday]

#aFactADay2022

#694: james cameron had a doctor of linguistics, a botanist and a zoologist on set to help him make sure everything was tip-top and scientifically plausible. but i find it ironic that he did all these things from scratch - the setting, the biology, the language, the history - but still recycled a lot of sound effects from jurassic park xD the language, Na'vi, is really interesting. it was designed to be easily learnable yet sound completely extra-terrestrial, and the measures to do so are cool. it started off at about 1000 words but since the 2009 movie, the dictionary has been expanded to over 2600 words and the grammar was published by its creator, paul frommer.

honestly i could do a whole week on the na'vi language. it took 3-4 years to initially develop, but was partially intelligible already by the time they cast the actors - they had to audition in na'vi. it was designed with a "polynesian flavour" but initially three versions of the language were created, each with very different sounds. early in development, cameron chose one of the three versions, which decided on the phonology, and by extension the syntax and morphology. i wonder how the language wouldve turned out had cameron been feeling different on that day. lots of mistakes were made on set, and some of these were written off as the sort of mistake a speaker would make anyway, but some were kept, and the language was altered to retrofit those mistakes.

today i was shown a very interesting interview with mark okrand, the creator of the Klingon conlang. he was talking about how he developed it - its first showing was between two characters, but the dialogue had already been filmed in english, so mark okrand had to retroactively fit the language, such that the dub synced with the lip movements of the actors. he also said a lot of similar things as the na'vi language, like that mistakes were incorporated into the language. both languages were designed to be alien-like, so lots of decisions in both were made based on its uncommonness - klingon uses an object-verb-subject formation, only found in a few languages on earth. furthermore, klingon has pronouns, suffixes and prefixes to indicate both subject and object type, but sometimes the actors missed these off, so he had to create rules where you could miss a pronoun (which would be implied by the prefix, for example). heres the video :)

[linguisticdiscovery]

When creating the Na’vi language for the Avatar movie, Paul Frommer chose to make the language have an octal (base-8) counting system because the Na’vi people only have 4 fingers on each hand.

Octal systems also exist in a few indigenous languages like Yuki in California and the Pamean languages of Mexico.

[pandora-crash-landing-survivor]

Oh i love Tsireya, she's so nice and friendly. But unfortunately, i have to pop your bubble about her a little.

The word in the song is "tìrey" specifically notice how it uses the accented ì and not a regular i. It's not just for fun, those are their own letters and they change the meaning of the word (as an example we have a beautiful pair of words txim = thorn and txìm = ass/butt lol).

As for the T vs TS, they are also 2 different sounds/letters that we just happen to write with the T symbol. Example of similar words using them: tun = red, tsun = can/be able - entitely different things.

For names, according to canon, they tend to be a gibberish - a combination of sounds that exist in na'vi, but don't mean anything in the form they have been assembled. And so, when creating names for OCs or nicknames for users, in the na'vi language community of the Kelutral discord server, some people freestyle it entirely, while some have the habit of picking a phrase or a handful of words with a meaning, chopping them into sylables, then playing lego with that. This strips names of all their original meaning.

It's possible that na'vi do a similar thing, but since we don't have a confirmation from Paul Frommer (the creator of the language) about whether na'vi use the same approach or not, any discussions about what does which name mean is futile, unfortumately.

And sure, you can try back engineer those things, but again, there are many words and many sounds they could be split into, so there's no sure way to say anything.

However, if you want to try, or if you just want to have a look around the na'vi lexicon for the fun of it, there are dictionaries like fwew, reykunyu and dict-navi with all known na'vi words (and there's a lot, karyu Pawl updates the vocab few times a year) where you can look up all kinds of words.

Fwew na'vi dictionary app

Reykunyu online dictionary

Dict-navi dictionary

Also please stay away from translators and from chatGPT when trying to do anything regarding the na'vi language, they are entirely useless and you will have much better results with searching manually word by word than trying to automate it. The AI is totally hopeless

Just a little Avatar theory, but I was listening to The Songcord when I decidedd to read the translations. And I found a navi word that kinda resembles Tsireya's name, called Tireya which means life. I wonder if Ronal and Tonowari gave her a name that involves something of life (not sure what the s or Tsi could mean by itself. It could be like 'Sweet Life' for example.) Overall, I think its cool that Tsireya's name might have an actual meaning to it that is in the Na'vi! AGGH, so cute too. Just to think that her name might have 'life' to it as a meaning.

LOOK AT HERZ LOOK AT MY SWEET GIRL

[sylwanin-was-right]

I got to the end of the Na'vi as a Second Language lessons on Kelutral.org and I'm a little sad that they ended (they end on the lesson about Na'vi Adpositions; there are no lessons yet for Clause Attribution and F-Words, Adverbs, and Conjunctions, nor the Topical Case. Lessons 2 and 3 dont have accessible lesson links either, at least not on mobile safari). But, again, I commend the Kelutral team for this wonderful, interactive resource because its truly very accessible and comprehensive so far.

I await the revival of the Avatar fandom to the extent that theres lots of funding and support for the rest of the Lessons because theyre already so helpful for basic grammar and syntax.

(Reminder! Kelutral.org has many resources on their resources page already for traditional text book language learning needs. The Kelutral Discord server bulletin boards and great channels for easily accessing resources for starting, and of course, the wonderful people, many long time fluent speakers, are there to help! Lastly Paul Frommer, the creator of Na'vi, runs Naviteri.org for many great explainations for vocabulary, language concepts, lesson videos, and more! This post is definitely not a discouragement as Na'vi as a Second Language is not the only accessible resource for learning lì'fya leNa'vi. Siva Ko!!!)

[avatarmovies]

Full Interview with Na'vi Language Creator Paul Frommer

[dedalvs]

Kopikon Presenters: Marc Okrand

Our last Kopikon speaker is Marc Okrand!

Marc Okrand is best known as the creator of Klingon—the most widely spoken and studied conlang created for a TV show/film. Marc created the Klingon language for the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and it's grown in fame ever since. He's worked on a ton of other Star Trek properties over the years, both as a Klingon translator and as a creator of other languages. He is also well-known for having created the Atlantean language for Disney's Atlantis.

Marc will close the day at Kopikon, presenting at 5:45 p.m. in Copley Formal Lounge at Georgetown University, September 23rd, 2023. To register, go here. The full schedule is listed below:

10:00 a.m. Opening remarks by David & Jessie

10:15 a.m. Sally Caves

10:45 a.m. Carl Buck

11:15 a.m. Break (20 minutes)

11:35 a.m. Sylvia Sotomayor

12:00 p.m. David Peterson

12:30 p.m. Lunch (90 minutes)

2:00 p.m. Paul Frommer

2:30 p.m. John Quijada

3:15 p.m. Break (30 minutes)

3:45 p.m. Music (Jillian and Andrew Aversa)

4:15 p.m. Jessie Sams

4:45 p.m. Break (15 minutes)

5:00 p.m. Biblaridion

5:45 p.m. Marc Okrand

6:30 p.m. Closing remarks by David & Jessie

[sylwanin-was-right]

Fwa ngal fteria lì'fyati leNa'vi lu kosman! :D – That you are studying the Na'vi language is fantastic! :D

To start out, we dont have a word for 'sex' in lì'fya leNa'vi yet (ironic considering that scene in A1 👀 and all the growing families throughout the franchise lol 😂)!

The closest is the adjective mowan describing something thats sensually or physical pleasing, usually in a sexual connotation:

And the only description we have about that word is from a brief mention of it by Paul Frommer (the language's creator and authority) on Naviteri.org when he clarified differences between mowan, prrte', and sunu in 2010.

There are other discussions of the word in a LearnNavi.org forum from the same year (which is cited by Dict-Na'vi in the screenshots above), but its a bit harder to discern between various messages if youre not used to forum formatting.

Hopefully one day there will be language to properly talk abt The Do in Na'vi LMFAO.

With that said...

"Motherfucking" is distinctively English (and English is distinctive of terran cultures in the Anglosphere), therefore it can only be approximated with a linguistic feature of Na'vi (be it a place in the sentence, word or part of a word) that fits the same role in the sentence rather than same literal meaning. This way, the entire sentence can be seen as an entire unit of thought that can filter into lì'fya leNa'vi naturally, rather 1:1 translations from literal definitions, which can be really clunky and hard to understand.

Thankfully, Na'vi has a variety of tools and methods to do things like give emphasis to parts of a sentence, which we'll cover below the cut. So in order to get to the grammar for a translation in Na'vi, lets first get a sense of the meaning of the English sentence, starting with its context in the song :D

According to many sources, "Starboy" by The Weekend ft. Daft Punk is a song about a male artist's rise to fame and a life of extravegance. This context helps to discern the semantics of challenging words like "starboy" (or "star boy") and "motherfucking" that dont have exact translations in Na'vi. So—ignoring grammar, like case endings, for now—in the sentence "I'm a motherfucking starboy", the first two words have exact translations in Na'vi.

I - oe — 1st person pronoun

Am - lu — copula

The rest, "a motherfucking starboy", lacks direct translations in Na'vi bc Na'vi doesnt have articles (the word "a" is the English indefinite article), the intensifier "motherfucker" has no direct translation, and "starboy" is a English compund word which also doesnt have a direct translation. But, we can still make do without any articles, and can build a word in Na'vi for "starboy" with a brief analyzation of its meaning. Ha, ralpeng ko! – So lets analyze!

Ignoring the definite article "a", "motherfucking" is an intensifier in English, or an adjective-like word that emphasizes a word its contiguous to. Unlike English, Na'vi usually utilizes syntax, or word order, to emphasize a word, so instead of a 1:1 translation for "motherfucking" to intensify "starboy", we would simply send "starboy" to the end of the sentence (this may deem obvious, but because Na'vi has free constituent order, there would be several different combinations of word orders you could have for this translation, with only one way marking the emphasis). Basically we can drop "motherfucking" from our translation bc its role in English is used as syntax in Na'vi! So now onto the last word, "starboy".

"Starboy" is a compound word in English, or 'Ìnglìsì. From the context of the song, it seems the "star" part refers to fame and noteriety rather than the stars of the sky, (or tanhì as you noted). In Na'vi, there is (so far) no word to refer to fame or noteriety as an adjective. But, txanro'tu is the noun for "a famous person", which we can use.

Also, while the song is abt a male protagonist and "boy" is the "head" of the English compound word, we can still interpret "boy" as a diminuitive to then use the Na'vi suffix -tsyìp to carry over that role in the translation. Personally I think the interpretation of "starboy" with the adjective about fame and the use of the dimunuitive works best bc it utilizes features of Na'vi that capture the feeling of the lyrics most accurately without losing too much semantics in translation.

Anyway, combining the noun and diminuitive suffix -tsyìp creates txanro'tutsyìp for "starboy"! Which means we now have all our lì'fya leNa'vi words to translate "I'm a motherfucking starboy" (which turns out are only 3):

I – oe — 1st person pronoun

Am – lu — verb/copula

Starboy – txanro'tutsyìp — noun

Now onto the grammar! :D

Regarding the grammar, you have the basic idea with the first two words "I" and "am" (contracted to I'm). Seysonìltsan! – great work! But the case endings were a little off and, as we just saw, theres a way to simplify the sentence. To break down the sentence grammatically, lets start with its syntax, or word order, in English.

Without getting too complicated for such a simple sentence (ignoring subjects like typology and constituents), we just need to identify the subject, verb, and object for both the English and Na'vi sentences. As a quick and simple refresher, the subject is the "doer" of the verb, the verb is the action of the sentence, and the object is the recipient of the action:

"I'm a motherfucking starboy" -> "oe lu txanro'tutsyìp"

Subject: I – oe

Verb: am (contracted to I'm) – lu

Object: [a motherfucking] starboy – txanro'atutsyìp

Tam! Tìkan lu stum awngaru! – Ok! We're almost there! Now for the final part: Case endings! :D

This one is very easy because this sentence doesnt need any! (To learn more about why, I highly recommend Horen by Stefan Müller and other Na'vi language learning resources like Kelutral.org and the Na'vi wikibook page—specifically under the "special verbs" section. But basically its because lu is a copular verb that can connect two noun phrases, and its also intransitive, meaning it cant take on a direct object, so the subject stays in the unmarked subjective case. You have an understanding already of case endings by your use of them in your initial translation so thats great!! :D ).

Set tìralpeng lu awnga! – So now we have a translation!

"I'm a motherfucking starboy." –> "Oe lu txanro'tutsyìp".

If my studies have been on the right track, then this is the most simple translation. I think there could be other ways to translate this but this reply is long enough lol.

so I’m recently in the habit of translating random lyrics from songs into na’vi…

and i know these translations are wrong because i’m just using the dictionary & google and i know nothing about na’vi grammar and sentence structure however

the other day i concluded that the direct translation of “im a motherfucking starboy” had to be “oeru syaw sa’nok muntxa si tanhi’evan”

Which surely can’t be right… right?

Surely the translation isn’t “i am called mother marry/mate star boy”

surely there’s a na’vi word for sex right? please tell me there is

(this is like, purely for my own entertainment i know i’m very wrong)

[conlangery]

Conlangery patrons at $5 and up now have access to my interview with Paul Frommer, the creator of the Na'vi language in Avatar. You can become a patron and watch it before it comes out on YouTube on Nov 27!

[bucketofchum]

@amphitheresarewingednoodles — I realise there is also a big different between WRITTEN conlang and movie/TV depictions. For the most part my post was on movies and TV shows, where directors are hiring a linguistics expert to invent a language and train actors to speak the invented language. Why not... actually get people from the languages/cultures the languages are inspired from anyway? Instead of using a white man as a conduit.

That said, a lot of the issues that you are pointing out about “permission” of such representation ... is....... still very much an issue in conlang. If you’re like “I want an evil sounding language!” and you draw inspiration from X or Y languages, that’s ..... that’s kind of just as bad as being like “I think X or Y languages sound evil”. Like that’s ... bad. And as a writer or creator, you should .... feel bad. That just seems to me like really fucking thinly veiled xenophobia, stereotyping, and racism lmao.

Instead of being like “Welsh is now gonna be my fantasy language” and just making it that way, you could actually make an effort to reach out to the people whose languages you are stealing from to inspire your conlang anyway and like ... you know... actually work to learn their language. To me, the argument of a lot of conlang is “I don’t want to deal with actually talking to people from these cultures and communities from which I am drawing inspiration so i’m just gonna cherry pick what I like from it and toss on my cultural biases but it will come across as refreshingly novel — also I did so much research to create this language!” whereas imagine actually reaching out to local indigenous groups with a language revitalization project to propose your story like “Hey I’m working on this story and I was wondering if I could try to include Lakota into my book as the language spoken by X group” and then you ACTUALLY LEARN LAKOTA WITH THE HELP OF THE ORGANIZATION.

Like that is REAL FUCKING RESEARCH and also transparent and respectful and involving the cultures from which you are drawing inspiration anyway.

ofc maybe you can’t learn a full ass language, but you communicate with educators in that language to get what you need for your story and you reference and fact check and confer with people in that field bc you know that’s part of the research process.

Story writing is different than spoken film adaptation which is what my original post was about, but I see a lot of people who are rly into conlang congratulating themselves over the amount of effort and research they are putting into creating a language when they could be making the process more collaboratively open and culturally rich by actually consulting with the people from whom they are inspired.

Do you think Tolkien conferred with Tibetans or Indians? mmmmmm. Do you think James Cameron or Paul Frommer consulted with the Maori? mmmmmmmmmmm.

[arigatogatos]

Making the Draenei Language - Part 1

So recently I've been inspired by the works of many other language creators such as David J. Peterson (of Dothraki and High Valyrian fame), Paul Frommer (who made Na’vi) and some conlangers on YouTube such as Biblaridion and Artifexian, and decided to look around to see if there has been any effort made into fleshing out the languages of Azeroth.

(Much more under the cut!)

As a Draenei and linguistics enthusiast I of course checked out if anything had been done to the language of my favourite fantasy race and after being alerted by @nessacity found the Te'Amun Word Compendium made by the Te’Amun guild on Moonguard. Sadly this hasn't been updated since around May 2016 and is largely a naming language though there is a start to some internal grammar (something I will start dissecting later in the post). Apart from the Te’Amun Word Compendium I couldn't find any other efforts to expand the Draenei vocabulary, so I decided to do some research for myself as to what we have already in canon.

Thankfully, on wikis and forums people have already compiled all the known Draenei text and names currently in the game, along with translations where there are any, and so, I did what any normal person would do and make a spreadsheet of the data and look for clues.

I also went through and added probable pronunciations (more on that later). So, first things first lets have a look at what can be extrapolated from what we have so far in canon.

drae | a prefix/adjective that means ‘exiled’. This can be seen in draenei - ‘Exiled Ones‘ and Draenor - ‘Exile’s Refuge.‘

sha | This fairly clearly means ‘Light’. This can be seen in Aar-don'sha, kai kahl'dos - A line spoken by Yrel which she translates as ‘In the Light, we triumph’, Ore Atal’sha - ‘For the Light!’ (Yet again spoken by Yrel), and in other names such as Sha'tar - ‘Born of Light’ and Shattrath - ‘Dwelling of Light.’

-nei | A derivational suffix that means ‘A person who is/has...’ Seen in Draenei

-nai | Something similar to the above, as it is mostly used in words that refer to groups of people. Seen in Kurenai and Auchenai 

-ari | Derivational suffix probably meaning ‘One who does...’ Seen in Man’ari, Rangari

-trath | Another derivational suffix meaning ‘place of...’

-dor | A suffix which typically marks settlements. Seen in Talador, Telredor, Kerabor.

-nor | A Suffix probably meaning ‘refuge’. Seen in Draenor ‘Exile’s Refuge’

-naar | Another suffix for places. Seen in Sha’naar

This is all stuff that many others have clued into and its really nice to see that at least to some extent, there was some thought put in by the writing staff into the structure of the language in the game. From here I decided to see if there was any more underlying structure.

The phrase that really caught my eye was ‘Shanai ortar’. This is spoken by an NPC Draenei called Apprentice Miall in the quest ‘In Ared’s Memory’ in WoD Draenor after her mentor has died. Here’s the text in context:

My master has gone on to the Light, but I will continue his work. <Miall looks to Ared > Shanai ortar, Ared. I will have his body sent to Auchindoun....

I predict this phrase is some sort of blessing, akin to something like ‘be at peace.’ Noting also that shanai has the root sha in it, meaning light, I can only imagine this phrase directly translated being something along the lines of ‘be with the light’. We also have seen the -nai suffix before but I think this really solidifies its meaning. if we take -nai to be a prepositional affix (post-positional in this case) meaning ‘Be with’ or just ‘with’, we get shanai meaning ‘With the light’. 

Extrapolating this onto Auchenai, through context I think a literal translation would be ‘with the dead’. This sounds weird in English but could definitely be a productive part of draenei grammar! I think Kurenai, which on the wiki is translated as ‘Redeemed’ ’in this case could be literally translated as something like ‘with honour’ as they are a group of escaped slaves who have regained their honour.

Okay back onto the ‘Shanai ortar’ sentence. Practically and clause or phrase has got to have a verb in it. As Gretchen McCulloch put it in their wonderful podcast Lingthusiam - “The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on”. As Shanai is pretty definitely a noun or prepositional phrase (depending on whether you want to analyse -nai as a post-position or as a commutative noun case, but that’s for later :P), that must mean ortar is a verb of some sort. I'm going to analyse -nai as a commutative noun case, which I feel is more interesting (and allows Shanai to be the object of the sentence). Taking ortar to mean ‘go/pass (in the metaphysical sense)’ and having Ared (the dead dude) being an omitted or implied subject we get a translation being ‘(Ared/You) go with the light’. 

What’s really important here is the word order. We have the verb last in the sentence with the object preceding it. This pins Draenei as having either SOV word order (like Korean and Turkish. Its also coincidently the most common word order cross-linguistically at 41% of the worlds languages), OSV word order (like Xavante and Warao. This is also the least common word order cross-linguistically at 0.3% of the worlds languages!) or OVS word order (Like Hixkaryana. Another very uncommon order at 0.8% of the worlds languages).

An example of these word orders using English would be the following (taking the sentence ‘I hit him’ as an example).

SOV: I him hit OSV: him I hit OVS him hit I

Its only at this point that I really decide that I actually want to try make this into a full language, so I have to pick a default word order (that is unless I want to do case marking on the nouns or subject marking on the verbs, which is an option!). Draenei being a race of aliens, I’d imagine their language also being quite dissimilar to what we have on earth so I decided to go with one of the rarer word orders. Out of the two I chose OSV because Klingon is OVS and ya know... I just don’t want to copy Klingon when making an alien language!

Sadly this doesn't mesh with what the Te’Amun word has :C. I really like the system of verbal agreement they’ve got going (sorta like Spanish but I believe this is the actual pronoun not an agreement marker) so I might incorporate that into what I'm doing but in a different way.

Anyway this post is getting real long so I'm going to do a part 2 soon on the sounds/pronunciation of the language (the phonology) so get excited for that! Thanks so much for reading if you made it all the way down here, and let me know if you have any suggestions for what to add to the language!

EDIT: @sielic has actually made a Draenei conlang called Tendral and made a really great video about it here.