Q & A - Paul Frommer

[Tirea Aean]

On Facebook, there is a group for ambitious conlangers to connect and talk about their and any other conlangs. [ https://www.facebook.com/groups/conlangs ] For this July, Na'vi was voted the conlang of the month. I then organized with Pawl a Q/A to be done via email. The members of the group added many questions to a poll, and the best ones were chosen to email to him to answer. Pawl then sent back the answers (Original Document attached). Here is the session:

Q & A—Paul Frommer

1. Does Na'vi have any other forms/dialects across Pandora?

In the first Avatar movie, we heard about Na'vi clans other than the Omaticaya—the Ikran People of the Eastern Sea, for example. It's plausible, then, that different clans living in different areas of Pandora would speak somewhat different forms of Na'vi, just as there are regional differences to be found among all Earth languages. It remains to be seen whether or not we'll learn more about these other dialects of Na'vi in the sequels.

2. Do you intend to publish books in the language?

If you mean books written entirely in Na'vi, no, I don't have any plans along those lines, at least not yet. As for a book about Na'vi, that might happen at some point.

3. What is the most useful concept to know when learning Na'vi?

People have different learning styles, particularly when it comes to learning a second language. For some learners, it might be useful to have an idea of the "big picture" facts about the structure of Na'vi before plunging into the details—that the consonant inventory contains ejectives; that there's a system of initial consonant mutations called lenition; that nouns and pronouns are inflected for case; that transitive agents and intransitive subjects are treated differently; that verbs are inflected through a system of infixes; that the word order is unusually flexible, with modifiers either preceding or following their heads and with all orderings of subject, object, and verb considered grammatical.

For other learners, it's more effective to simply dive in and begin learning some simple words, phrases, and conversational patterns. The big picture will emerge gradually.

For everyone, though, I think it's important to get a good start with the pronunciation, so you feel confident when you open your mouth and speak. Na'vi pronunciation has a few tricky things to master, but on the whole I don't think it's particularly hard. When you feel good about speaking a language—not just reading and writing it—your progress accelerates.

It's also important to try to use the language, even in the early stages, in real communication situations with other learners rather than just as an artificial exercise. That goes a long way to helping it "sink in."

4. What was your favourite moment teaching the language to someone?

I don't know if I can name one particular favorite moment, since there have been so many. I loved it, for example, when I heard the actors nail their Na'vi lines, even if they didn't understand all of the grammar. Without exception, they all worked really hard to make the language seem natural and alive in their mouths. It was also great to hear a few Na'vi phrases make their way around the movie set among the cast and crew—most notably the non-complimentary word skxawng. Perhaps most of all, though, it's been so gratifying to see the language I invented embraced by dedicated fans who use it not only accurately but also in creative and elegant ways. And I love it when I post new vocabulary or expanded structures to my blog, and readers ask probing questions that actually help me understand the language better myself.

5. If you could speak to a native from Pandora, what would you speak about?

Wow. So many things to ask. I'd want to learn everything I could about Pandora itself, about their lives, about their beliefs, about what's important to them. I'd love to hear more about their
relationship to Eywa, for example. And I'd be really interested in any advice they had for us humans about how we could learn to respect our own environment on Earth and not wind up killing each other and the planet.

6. Do you use Na'vi in personal conversations?

I use Na'vi in written much more than spoken form, which is perhaps inevitable but not necessarily a good thing. I need to engage in more spoken conversation myself. The Na'vi learners who use the spoken language regularly are making great progress.

7. Would you like to see Na'vi become a living language?

If "living language" means one that's currently used for genuine communication, then Na'vi is already that. But the term usually refers to a language that's someone's first, native language and that grows and evolves naturally. In that sense, I'm not sure Na'vi—or indeed any conlang invented for a fictional world—will ever achieve that status, since it's hard to imagine people bringing up children in an Earth environment where the language is naturally spoken around them. I believe an experiment along those lines was once done with Klingon; as far as I know, it didn't succeed too well. It's not impossible, however; after all, we have a precedent of a language that was once considered dead but that was brought back to life: Hebrew, which is now the native language and mother tongue of millions of people. For that to happen, though, the parents need to be just as comfortable in the target language as they are in their first language. We're not yet at the point where that's possible for Na'vi, since the vocabulary still lacks terms for all the things we find around us mì 'Rrta, on earth. In the future, though, if we get to the point where we have two Na'vi-speaking parents who are truly fluent and want to bring their newborn child up bilingually—in Na'vi plus whatever their native language is—I'd be really interested in seeing how that turns out!

8. What aspects of Language do you believe are too overlooked or even not understood by conlangers?

Probably the fact that language is constantly evolving, and that all aspects of language—phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, etc.—change over time. So when you're deciding what's presently true about your language, you need to think about how it got that way, what historical changes may have taken place to result in the present forms. For example, when I introduce a new compound, I often mention its etymology: how it originated, and what changes over time in pronunciation and meaning yielded the current form. That kind of thinking adds depth, consistency, and plausibility to your language.

9. Do you have advice for conlangers just starting to create a new language?

The best language creators, I think, are those who have experience with a wide range of natural languages, which gives them a better sense of what languages can do and how they do it. A good grounding in general linguistics is certainly valuable, but even more so is hands-on experience learning and speaking languages that are very different from your own, so you begin to see the range of what's open to you in creating your own language. One of the biggest pitfalls in language creation is being unconsciously influenced by your own native language and unwittingly mirroring its idiosyncrasies in your conlang. You're less likely to do that if you've studied other real languages that are very different from your own. If you speak English and Spanish, for example, it's great to study other West Germanic and Romance languages—German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese . . . But as a conlanger, it would be even more valuable to study languages in language families that are far removed from Indo-European: Arabic, say, or Finnish, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Zulu, Cherokee, Navajo . . . The more you know about a
wide range of natural languages, the more you good ideas you can get about coming up with a rich, linguistically valid, interesting, and unique language of your own.

[Tìtstewan]

Txantsan!!!

That FB poll was an excellent idea and I'm happy too see answered questions which are really interesting!

5. If you could speak to a native from Pandora, what would you speak about?

Wow. So many things to ask. I'd want to learn everything I could about Pandora itself, about their lives, about their beliefs, about what's important to them. I'd love to hear more about their
relationship to Eywa, for example. And I'd be really interested in any advice they had for us humans about how we could learn to respect our own environment on Earth and not wind up killing each other and the planet.

[Plumps]

Eltur tìtxen si. Furia ngal ayoer wìntxu nì'eng irayo si.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[Tanri]

On Facebook, there is a group for ambitious conlangers to connect and talk about their and any other conlangs. [ https://www.facebook.com/groups/conlangs ] For this July, Na'vi was voted the conlang of the month.

Tì'efumì oeyä, kosman lu fwa lì'fya leNa'vi väpeykar mì ronsem suteyä, hufwa txankrr solalew takrra fkol muwìntxu tsat fa Uniltìrantokx (alu rel arusikx).
In my opinion, it's fantastic that Na'vi language keeps itself in the people's mind, despite long time that has passed from it's presentation in Avatar (the movie).

Irayo!

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

Very interesting! Although its a personal challenge for me to do it, I am glad to see that Pawl is beginning to emphasize the importance of speaking the language.

User Neytiri had 'dragged' me into the Conlangs Facebook page, where these questions were asked. It will be interesting to see what comes of that!

[Wind12]

A very nice read

[utraltireaite]

I continue to be in awe of Paul Frommer,  the Na'vi language and those who now use it. For myself, regrettably, I started to lose understanding in sentence 2 of answer 3,    such is my inability to grasp grammar. 
Nevertheless, being here on LN keeps me 'in the zone', so Irayo.

[Talis]

Txantsan! Irayo! That's very interesting

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

I continue to be in awe of Paul Frommer,  the Na'vi language and those who now use it. For myself, regrettably, I started to lose understanding in sentence 2 of answer 3,    such is my inability to grasp grammar. 
Nevertheless, being here on LN keeps me 'in the zone', so Irayo.

If grammar is that intimidating to you, you are probably a 'low road learner'. You learn better by doing. A lot of other folks share your frustration. What you need to do is exercises where reading, speaking, and lots of repetition are involved. If you do these regularly, you will pick upon most of the grammar, etc. rules. Look in the 'Project Ngaynume' thread, and try to work with some of the resources there.

[archaic]

A lot of other folks share your frustration.

True.

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

Too bad you can't join us at an avatarMeet sometime, where a lot of speaking is done. It teaches you soething that neither formal grammar learning, or learning by reading/writing-- it teaches you to listen, and think on your feet. I suspect very few folks here get enough of this. I certainly don't.

A lot of other folks share your frustration.

True.

[CyanRachel]

Irayo nìtxan, Tirea Aean, for posting this Q&A here! It's so interesting to read Pawl's answers.