Tea Dietterich to meet Avatar language master

Added: 07-03-10

MMLM Director and AUSIT Vice President Tea C. Dietterich is heading to L.A. mid March to meet with Linguistics Professor Paul R. Frommer, creator of the language of the Na'vi people of the Hollywood blockbuster movie "AVATAR". Tea invited Professor Frommer to be key note speaker at the 2010 AUSIT Conference (www.ausitconference.org) in Fremantle on 5/6 Nov 2010 and will be now visiting L.A. and Hollywood to learn more about the Avatar language creator and to discuss details about his forthcoming trip to Australia. Watch this space for more details.

Background (NPR)

Director James Cameron commissioned an entire language for the Na'vi. Paul Frommer, a professor at the University of Southern California, is the linguist who built it for him — and he says the bar Cameron set was pretty high. "He wanted a complete language, with a totally consistent sound system, morphology, syntax," Frommer says. And "he wanted it to sound good — he wanted it to be pleasant, he wanted it to be appealing to the audience." Paul Frommer has studied languages as varied as Mandarin and Hebrew — and wrote a linguistics workbook that includes an exercise in deciphering Klingon.

Frommer spent years working on the Na'vi language, eventually teaching it to all of the principal actors who have to speak it, and making recordings for them to listen to on their iPods. Later, he worked on the set during shooting, coaching actors on pronunciation between takes, and even writing the occasional extra line when Cameron decided a scene needed tweaking. And though he invented the language, says Frommer, that last part wasn't always a snap."Sometimes I could come up with it right away, and sometimes I'd have to say, 'Give me five minutes, OK?' "

He recalls one memorable example: "Jim Cameron and Sam Worthington came up to me and said, 'We've decided that the character Jake is going to be recounting an incident he had where he was bitten in his big blue butt — so how do you say 'big blue butt?' ... I had 'big' and I had 'blue,' but I didn't have 'butt.' "

A Language Of His Own, And No One To Speak It With. The actors in Avatar worked hard to learn the dialogue on the page, but none of them actually mastered the Na'vi language, with all its internally consistent rules of grammar and syntax.