As part of his worldbuilding for Avatar, James Cameron sought to create an actual language for the Na'vi to speak on screen. So he tapped Paul Frommer, a Hollywood linguistic consultant and a professor of clinical management at the University of California's Marshall School of Business. Cameron has a few dozen Na'vi words including characters' names, and he looked to Frommer to build a language that was melodious and exotic, but still pronounceable by human actors.

Frommer developed syntactical rules for Na'vi as well roughly 1000 words between the movie and the video game. He limited the syllables spoken by the Na'vi in order to shape the language, and added ejectives, voiceless consonants that occur in a minority of the world's spoken languages. Of course, there were limits on what Frommer could bring to the language:

"The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans," Frommer said. "I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do."

Like Klingon, Na'vi could be learned and spoken, and Frommer hopes Avatar fans will take to the musical Na'vi the way Star Trek fans have learned the more gutteral Klingon. He says that information about the language will be made available online, and he's looking forward to the day when he can converse with another human being in Na'vi.

It may be too early to start translating Hamlet into the language of Pandora's blue aliens, but it's fascinating to read about Frommer's process and the detail that went into creating Na'vi.

USC professor creates an entire alien language for 'Avatar' [Hero Complex]

Troop is a health psychologist and lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. Much of his work is focused on eating disorders and trauma, but he is also investigating how word usage can affect one's mood and health. As a sideline to his research, Troop decided to analyze the lyrics of all of David Bowie's songs using text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Troop also looked at the relative success of Bowie songs, and based on his findings, penned lyrics to what he believes to be the "ideal" Bowie song. He explains his process in detail below, and sings his alleged hit-in-the-making, "Team, Meet Girls" at 4:24:

Team, Meet Girls; Girls, Meet Team (© Nick Troop, 2009)

Buddy loves good loving : Calm and proud while peace wins
Warmth and conversation : Heaven's energy and an elegant charm
Truth wins – an adult love to win awards
Sweet faith : Secure in the affection of a better boy
Feeling admiration : A cheerful kiss, kiss the phone
Truth wins – an adult love to win awards
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
They met and were loving : Perfectly amazed, comfort and cared for
A loyal companion : Share, relax, creating humans XXX
Dear charm, playing nice give paradise smiles
Truth wins – an adult love to win awards
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Special persons with casual ease enjoy the band
Lucky and rich, a special guest hero
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Girls, meet team; team, meet girls

Scientist writes 'ideal' David Bowie Song [news:lite via William Gibson]

Here's a taste of Okrent's tale:

Despite the fact that more than 250,000 copies of Okrand's Klingon dictionary have been sold, very few people know how the language really works. There are maybe 20 or 30 people who can hold their own in a live, unscripted Klingon conversation and a few hundred or so who are pretty good with written Klingon. But most Star Trek fans who buy the dictionary skip the grammatical rules that constitute the first half of the book and turn straight to the word list. They make up wedding vows, song lyrics, or insults to lob at their opponents in role-playing games, but they ignore the grammar, simply popping dictionary words into English sentences. So Star Trek discussion boards end up peppered with phrases like this: yIn nI' je chep.

That is some seriously bad Klingon. It's a string of words that's supposed to mean "Live long and prosper" but instead says something like "life … something is long … and … something prospers." It's ungrammatical. (Plus, it's a Vulcan sentiment; Klingons don't say such things.)

If you are a language geek or just interested in the Trek universe, you've got to check out Okrent's article on Slate.

The alien and the human would be facing much intensive co-operative work to get a basic understanding of each other's methods of communication, language and culture. Ask any field linguist who has encountered a previously unknown tribe just how difficult this can be, even when both parties are human. SF writers struggle with this problem every time they write a first-contact story.

However, few SF writers are linguists, matched only in lack of expertise by their readers. The solutions can seem to owe as much to the black arts as to science (but then, as Arthur C Clarke said, "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic"). One solution, common enough to be a convention of the genre, like hyperspace, is the universal translator. The Star Trek series found it an invaluable time-saver, though a version of it appeared first in Murray Leinster's story First Contact of 1945.

Even if it translates the words, it may not get the message across. Naomi Mitchison suggested in Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) that trying to communicate with a five-armed starfish would show the extent to which our bilateral symmetry constrains us to a binary view of the world - true versus false, right versus wrong, black versus white. In The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle imagine three-armed aliens, who argue not just "on the one hand" and "on the other hand", but also "on the gripping hand", a trilateral logic. C J Cherryh's Hunter of Worlds (1977) presents the language of the Iduve, in which there's "no clear distinction between noun and verb, between solid and action", so that translation cannot be literal if it is to be meaningful. Jean-Luc Picard comes across something similar in Star Trek: The Next Generation when he encounters a race that speaks only in metaphor.

via Oxford University Press

After poring over hours of videotaped footage of bonobos communicating with humans, Pedersen determined that the creatures do two human-like things when they talk. First, they take turns: The bonobo waits for the human to stop talking before it tries to communicate. Second, they use language to get what they want. In one case Pedersen studied, a bonobo repeatedly asked to be picked up when she was around a dog she disliked. Eventually, she talked her human companion into picking her up, thus taking her out of the orbit of the annoying dog.

Great Ape Trust bonobo research director William Fields said he's excited about Pedersen's work, and that there's more research like it to come:

These papers will eventually be assembled in a larger volume to look at issues in the development of forgiveness and other cultural dimensions of the apes' lives.

OK I'm ready for chimps that use sign language and bonobos that communicate with objects. But I'm not really ready for apes to have "forgiveness and other cultural dimensions." I'm cool with unforgiving apes, as long as they are supergiant and beat the crap out of dinosaurs.

Linguistic Tools [via Science Daily]

The best part is that the U Michigan list doesn't just include the best scifi books that contain alien languages and futuristic human ones. It also includes books with linguist heroes (there are surprisingly many, including awesome novel The Sparrow, as well as Elgin's own Native Tongue), animal languages (think Rendezvous With Rama), and books that use linguistic theory.

For some reason, Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn isn't included here, despite the fact that it's written in a weird space patois. However, the list is packed with intriguing stories I now want to devour, like this one: We Have Always Spoken Panglish, by Suzette Haden Elgin, which is apparently about "a linguist from 'the U.S. Corps of Linguists' [who] tries to save an endangered extraterrestrial language." Another is Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, set in a postapocalyptic, Dark Ages-style England about 2000 years from now, and written in a future version of English. Hoban is also the author of A Mouse and His Child, a book that turned my brain inside-out as a kid (please ignore the movie version of it).

Linguistics in SciFi Book List [Eastern Michigan University] (Thanks, Sacha!)

Conlangers include everyone from Marc Okrand, the linguist who wrote Klingon, to the nerds who invented the most perfectly logical language in the world, known as Lojban. Anthony Burgess invented a little conlang for his characters in Clockwork Orange, and Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy is all about a group of rebel women linguists who create their own language to subvert their ultra-sexist society. Sometimes Hollywood employs conlangers to make alien talk seem more realistic, and sometimes conlangers wind up going into computer programming, where they can invent computer languages to their heart's content. Larry Wall, inventor of scripting language Perl, is a conlanger, for example. And nobody who has ever used Perl will be surprised to hear that. Chart via Bartleby.

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Merriam-Webster's runner-up was the verb "facebook," meaning to add somebody to your group of friends. For example, Bob facebooked Alice but then Eve de-facebooked Bob. Glad they picked w00t. But Global Language Monitor's runner-up words were equally yuck: "surge" (as in Iraq) and "bubble" (as in what's bursting in the US economy right now). GLM also noted that the most popular emoticon was ?-), the smiley for pirates. In addition, the mostly widely-understood word in the world is "O.K."

w00t Crowned Word of the Year [Reuters]