Language professionals especially those who are in the job for the love of it, are generally eager to know not only about those languages in which they are experts but also others. They are interested in knowing about the entire life-cycles of various languages including their birth, evolution and death. Most languages develop naturally as they are used by their speakers over a period of years and centuries. But there are also those languages that are developed artificially by linguists.
There can be many reasons behind that some linguists want to develop a universal language which is easy to learn and master and thus adopt. Esperanto is an example of such a language. A very interesting reason for developing languages is for literature and art. Take a book like The Lord of the Rings which had its author J.R.R. Tolkien develop an entirely new language called Elvish complete with a couple of dialects, for its characters. In more recent times, new languages have also been developed for movies/television series like Star Trek (Klingon). The latest among such initiatives is Na’vi a language developed for Avatar, one of the most widely anticipated movies in recent times.
While Klingon was taken up by fans of Star Trek and popularized to such an extent that there are now many Star Trek fans worldwide who are fluent in it. Na’vi, on the other hand has been developed by a linguistics expert, Professor Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California. The language was developed to be spoken by characters inhabiting a fictional moon called Pandora. It has got a vocabulary of around 1,000 words and only time will tell how Avatar is received by its fans and till what extent they go on to use and promote Na’vi. Rest assured the folks at Tomedes will be monitoring it closely and just in case it becomes popular and important enough to require language translation services, we’ll surely be there to provide it.
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One Comment
So curious about the avatar language…It’s very good.