If you’re having trouble remembering your verb tables or getting your tenses confused, don’t give up hope. You can always invent your own language!
Movie geeks everywhere are eagerly anticipating the release of new Hollywood blockbuster, Avatar. In it you’ll hear something you won’t have heard before. That’s because the alien language Na’vi was devised especially for the film by a top American linguist. Director James Cameron hired Paul Frommer to come up with a fully functional language that the 10 foot blue aliens could speak – but one that could be spoken by the human actors providing the voices. He has spent four years working on the language and plans to keep going after creating all the linguistic rules as well as just over 1000 words. Read the LA Times article here for more information and for some interesting quotes from Frommer himself.
So will it catch on and become the new Klingon? Or is it a lot of unnecessary work? I think I will stick to learning French, somehow I think it’ll be a bit more useful!
