had klingon in mind when he began envisioning the linguistic landscape of avatar about three years ago he hyped frommers development of the navi language by boasting to entertainment weekly that it would outklingon klingon frommer now dismisses this as a bit of cameronian hyperbole assuring me that he has nothing but respect for okrands masterwork in fact frommer got the avatar assignment in part on the strength of his work on looking at languages an elementary linguistics workbook that includes a student exercise in deciphering klingon word order klingon follows the unusual objectverbsubject ordering while frommer was working out the structure of navi in 2005 and 2006 however he studiously avoided looking at klingon or any other constructed language or conlang for short instead he drew on his mentor bernard comries work on linguistic typology and his own wideranging study of languages as diverse as persian malay hebrew and mandarin chinese the most exotic items in the navi sound system are three ejectives kx px and tx that require explosive bursts of breath they come in handy for such piquant epithets as skxawng loosely translated as moron which became a popular putdown among crew members during production like klingon navi needed to be exotic enough for audiences to recognise its alienness but not so exotic that it was beyond the ability of human actors to articulate despite the muchheralded visual effects of avatar cameron insisted that the sounds of navi speech remain unmanipulated whats more the film depicts human characters with varying proficiency in navi sam worthington as jake sully must learn the language when he is projected into alien form to go undercover on pandora meanwhile an experienced botanist sigourney weaver schools an eager young scientist joel david moore in the finer points of conversational navi it is in these linguistically credible interactions that avatar may make its biggest contribution to science fiction in her foreword to the encyclopedia of fictional and fantastic languages ursula k le guin mocked the conventions of pulp scifi perpetuated by films like the star wars franchise the permanent hegemony of manly englishspeaking men the risible grotesqueness of nonenglish languages and the inviolable rule that pretty women have musical names ending in a the linguist harold f schiffman has similarly noted that alien languages in films are primarily designed to confuse and amuse with little or no attention paid to the nuances of crosslinguistic communication our scifi heroes may still be buff english speakers but a little sensitivity across the humanalien divide could help them seem less like skxawngs nyt the author is the executive producer of visualthesauruscom