Language Log

I've received several messages with links to this NYT piece since its appearance online on Sunday. The piece is on Dothraki, a constructed language used in the HBO series "Game of Thrones" and invented by David J. Peterson, founder and President of the Language Creation Society and (as it happens) a former PhD student here in the Extreme Southwest Wing of Language Log Plaza. The piece also talks about constructed languages ("conlangs") and language constructors ("conlangers") a bit more generally, and most specifically with respect to their use in Hollywood. (That 'their' is purposely ambiguous.)

As you know, I undertake the arduous task of covering the vast universe of movies for Language Log. (This at least is the way I write up the paperwork that gets all my cinematic entertainment charged to the Language Log corporate expense account on a fully IRS-defensible basis.) The film I saw today, one of the best political dramas in ten or twenty years, has a humbling lesson for linguists, in a sort of zen way.

Long-time readers will know that I sometimes attend films that I deem to be of linguistic interest and report on them for Language Log (here and here, for example). I attended another screening today: I went to see Johnny English Reborn.

Was there serious linguistic content to report on, you instinctively ask? Of course there was, of course there was. You surely cannot seriously think that I would attend a lowbrow Bond-spoofing comedy starring Rowan Atkinson and pretend there was linguistic interest just so that I could charge the price of my ticket on Language Log's corporate American Express card! Ha! No, no, no.

In advance of the fifth and last season of The Wire, HBO released a documentary-like special called "The Last Word". The very first line is from an interview with series protagonist Dominic West, who says: "What makes The Wire so amazing is its level of authenticity." (Watch the first part of the special here.)

Even now, after having re-watched the entire series several times, I'm floored by the irony of that line, spoken in West's native British dialect (born in Sheffield, but of Irish descent). West plays Detective James "Jimmy" McNulty of the Baltimore Police Department, and McNulty is a very American character: breaking all the rules in a very selfish (but also self-destructive) way, all in the name of some greater good (doing "real police" work and catching the bad guys). So how authentic can the show be, if this very American character is played by a Brit?

After being inundated with Bruce Lee movies in the 1970s and saturated with Kung Fu Panda films and TV series in the 2000s, only a zombie would be numb to the call of the Kung-fu masters.  Unless you are a tea aficionado, however, you may not have heard of Kung-fu Tea.  (N.B.:  Kung-fu is Wade-Giles romanization, gongfu is Hanyu Pinyin.)  For those who do know about Kung-fu Tea, even tea specialists among them are divided over both the meaning of the term and the way to write it in Chinese characters.  Should it be gōngfu chá 工夫 茶 or gōngfu chá 功夫茶?  And does the name mean "tea that requires a lot of effort and skill to prepare" or "martial arts tea"?

The 2004 remake of The Flight of the Phoenix is on TV here right now. According to the Wikipedia article it wasn't all that well received, with many critics of the opinion that it didn't improve on the original. However, there is one point that they seem to have missed: this version is set in Mongolia, and the unfortunately brief conversation with the bandits is in comprehensible Mongolian! I don't think I've ever encountered Mongolian before in an American film.

While we're on the subject of yoghurting sprezzatura, let's not overlook the scene in the 1966 After the Fox in which Peter Sellers plays a monolingual Italian criminal masquerading as an American tourist in Rome:

(In his native Italian persona, Sellers speaks in Italian-accented English. Of course.) (I love this movie.)

Arika Okrent, author of the wonderful book In the Land of Invented Languages, has a new article on Slate about the burgeoning community of Avatar fans who have become obsessed with the movie's alien language, Na'vi. Before the movie was released, I had gotten to know the creator of the language, Paul Frommer, for a New York Times Magazine column I wrote about Na'vi and other cinematic sci-fi languages. At my request, Paul was then kind enough to write up a Language Log guest post, "Some highlights of Na’vi," just in time for Avatar's opening weekend. As Arika tells it in the Slate piece, that guest post and its comments section played a key role in the emergent subculture of linguistically engaged Na'vi-philes.

Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film The Hurt Locker, claiming that screenwriter Mark Boal based the film's central character on him after Boal was embedded in Sarver's bomb squad unit in Iraq. I can't speak to the overall merits of the case, but one claim rings particularly hollow. The Detroit News reports:

Sarver said the very title of the movie was a phrase he coined in Iraq, and that Boal asked its meaning after hearing him use it. Boal has since copyrighted the phrase, Fieger said.
Sarver explained today that the term is akin to Davy Jones Locker, where legend says drowned sailors are kept.
"It's just a horrible place you go when you mess up," Sarver said. "It's a mental state. A place that's full of pain and hurt."

Unfortunately for Sarver, (in the) hurt locker is military slang dating back to 1966, as a quick trip to Google News Archive readily shows. I give the full history of the expression in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. Check it out.

[Update: For more on the supposed "copyright" of the phrase, see Dave Wilton's post on Wordorigins.org.]

That's the tagline for Banksy's soon to be released film Exit Through the Gift Shop. This is turning out to be a good day for sentences you need to read twice. And it's rare to find one which says nothing and everything (about street art, grammar, movies, you name it) so precisely.

[via the Guardian]

I just watched The Man Who Would be King for the Nth time. For those who don't know it, this is the film version of a short story by Rudyard Kipling about two Englishmen retired from the Indian Army who set off to become kings of the mythical Kafiristan. Along the way they acquire the services of a Gurkha called Billyfish, who among other things, serves as their interpreter.

If I have identified the languages correctly, Billyfish addresses the natives of Kafiristan in Urdu, but they reply in Arabic. Neither is really appropriate for the area, which is presumably intended to be in the general area of Afghanistan or the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan (though the people are depicted as non-Muslim). A guess is that linguistic authenticity was not a priority and that the film makers simply had the actors speak languages that they knew. The actor who played Billyfish, Saeed Jaffrey, is an Indian Muslim who speaks Urdu and Punjabi. The Kafiristanis were presumably played by local actors, which means they knew Arabic since the film was actually made in Morocco. But before I go too far with this speculation, perhaps someone more competent in Urdu and Arabic than I am can confirm or deny that these are indeed the languages spoken.

James Cameron's sci-fi blockbuster Avatar is opening this weekend with much fanfare. As has been widely reported, Cameron enlisted a linguist, Paul Frommer of USC's Marshall School of Business, to create the Na’vi language, spoken by the inhabitants of the alien world Pandora. We first heard about the development of Na’vi nearly three years ago, when Cameron was hyping the as-yet-unnamed language of Pandora as one that would "out-Klingon Klingon." (See my post, "Advances in cinematic xenolinguistics," Jan. 29, 2007.) When I decided to write about Na’vi and other alien tongues of the silver screen for the New York Times Magazine On Language column, I finally got to learn the real story of the language's construction from Paul Frommer himself ("Skxawng!," NYT, Dec. 6, 2009).

Paul generously shared a great deal of material describing Na’vi's phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, hardly any of which found a place in my On Language column. But since there is already tremendous interest in the language, and some less-than-accurate information about it is currently floating around online, I asked Paul if he could write up a formal description of Na’vi as a Language Log guest post. He wasn't able to reveal everything about the language, but what he has sketched out should whet the appetite of even the most diehard xenolinguistics buffs.

This is a long-overdue follow-up to my post (from April 26), announcing the availability of the film The Linguists on Babelgum.com. A couple things that I failed to point out in that post: first, the version of the film on Babelgum is the DVD version, not the slightly shorter cut that has aired on PBS; second, there are several additional clips that you can watch separately on Babelgum that are on the DVD. Search for "the linguists" on Babelgum and you'll find links to the trailer, the film, and the additional clips. These are all available for some unspecified limited period, so watch 'em now if you're interested.

What I'm really following up on here, though, is this comment by Jesse Tseng.

I was struck by this sentence [in the film, spoken by David Harrison–eb]:

I don't see how you can justify devoting your research career to the syntax of French (a language with millions of speakers), when the skills that you possess could help document a language that is going to go extinct within your lifetime.

Hmm. The fieldwork skills I possess would make me go extinct long before any tribal language I helped to document. And good luck doing any syntax at all with your 15 sentences of Kallawaya…

Seriously, I was disappointed to hear this gratuitous swipe at the colleagues down the hall. I would like to believe that we are all engaged in a common endeavor, with the same justifications. And when linguistics departments get cut, all the sub-fields of linguistics go down together. Or are they hoping that the money then gets funneled into Anthropology?