Avatar and Na'vi

If you've seen Avatar but do not really care to verbalize the fact that you were sort of into the whole 3-D experience, and perhaps even James Cameron, you might find that economy of speech will not quite apply to one aspect of it: the Na'vi language. If you're at all linguistically minded, you're bound to be impressed by this achievement.
In the spirit of candidness, I tend to have little interest in Cameron's work. I'm more interested in Nolan's type of action films, think Dark Knight. But, be it as it may, it is quite impressive to learn about the extensive work and research that Cameron put into this film, the narrative, and the language of the Na'vi. To create the Na'vi language, the director hired linguist Paul Frommer of USC's Marshall School of Business. This site has much to say about the syntax and phonology of the Frommer-concocted language. In sum, impressive stuff. Reading this information on Na'vi made me think the following, "so, basically, Na'vi is like a West Germanic language, verbal and substantive inflection allows for movement within the sentence. Hmm."

A bit from the article says:

Syntax

The most notable aspect of Na’vi syntax is the freedom of word order. The case system allows all 6 sequences of S, O, and V. Additionally, adjectives, genitives, and relative clauses can either precede or follow their heads.

Nouns and adjectives are tied together by the morpheme a, which comes between them and is attached as a bound morpheme to the adjective. For example, ‘long river’ is either ngima kilvan or kilvan angim.

So, tip of the hat to James Cameron and Paul Frommer for a most impressive cinematic and linguistic project.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

graph per independent.co.uk

Knackered? Miffed? Read This.

Those of you who travel generously to places where the languages you already speak, are spoken, are bound to have encountered certain lexemes or syntactic structures that are unknown to you. That's the beauty of language, after all. Changes are actuated quickly and language always changes. It's one of the things we can basically always trust in: language changes regardless of our input. I quite like the caprice of language. Since it can get unpredictable, it'll always be interesting. If only more things were as interesting as language, but I digress.

If you ask a Bavarian: "Wie ist es Dir?", s/he will get the point and will most likely say: "Gut, gut, selbe[r]?" While 'Wie ist es Dir?' is quite an old saying, actually it's a modern German rendering of a question that Parzival asks his uncle Anfortas in the medieval narrative Parzival, but again, I digress. I suppose, deep down my desire for context always manages to rear its head somehow. But back to the topic.

If you're a Brit visiting the South of the US, let's say Louisiana, you'll notice that people are fixing to do this and that. No, they're not fixing or repairing things, per se. They're simply getting ready to embark on a task.

I illustrate: "Bobbie Sue, I'm fixing to go over to the mechanic and see about the car." One can imagine how the different layers of meaning can inform one another in a number of ways here.

Having said this, do read Roger Cohen's article on The Times. If you're philology-enamored, you will be entertained.

This article was perhaps the best thing I read today. It's the end of the day and I'm quite knackered myself, [hint: if you don't know this means, read the article!]

A bit says:

"A poet friend, Vincent Katz, was over for dinner the other night and asked me with a twinkle in his eye if I was “knackered.” Katz came to poetry via rock ’n roll, and to Oxford via the University of Chicago, and along the way he picked up some English vernacular.
...
Katz read classics at St. John’s College (viewed as a too-beautiful refuge of sporty underachievers by my own Balliol) and he summed up the experience this way: “I began to realize (what I should have known all along) that I was living in a completely different culture. It was just as alien to me as France would have been, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany. There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don’t.”
Read it all here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

graph per http://www.class.csupomona.edu/colorfulflags/Webpage/Images/wheelconcept.jpg

Verb, Mind Your Role!

If you were asked to provide a 'tree diagram' for this paragraph, would you manage to do so?

"My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars."

Via Dick Cavett's NYT piece.

Of Awkward Syntax

The following paragraph would have to take the cake as the most syntactically confusing paragraph I read today.

“I’m not saying he’s dishonest, but in terms of judgment, in terms of being able to answer a question forthrightly, it has two different parts to this. The judgment and the truthfulness and just being able to answer very candidly a simple question about when did you know him, how did you know him, is there still — has there been an association continued since ’02 or ’05, I know I’ve read a couple different stories. I think it’s relevant.”

Qtd by Maureen Dowd.

speech

I have thought a lot about Back Formation lately.
Back Formation is a linguistic term which refers to the formation/creation of a new word by removing affixes, i.e., certain parts of the word. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation.

An example would be the verb 'opine' born out 'opinion.' And 'opine' is a bona fide verb. The following, however, are NOT.

"commentate" - commentary
"orientate" - orientation
"conversate" - conversation

And something from syntax:

"must have 'went' - must have gone

They annoy one. In an appetite-suppressing sort-of-way.

Miss South Carolina: Take Syntax, by Jove!

Here is Miss South Carolina full "answer."

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.”


I have parsed many a sentence in my short life but, I have to say, I have yet to see a concoction SUCH AS this one. What synaptic connections are responsible for such a phenomenon?

Mother Language: we all apologize.

And here's Jimmy Kimmel's parsing of Miss Carolina's 'sentence.'

Thanks, Jimmy!

http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Khx0D9Vxg


as per youtube