Movie Review: Avatar (but mostly Na'vi)

Those who know my obsession with languages, real or imagined, will not be astonished that I went twice to Avatar, once for the experience and once for the language (and the 3D). I do this with rented movies, too, rewatching them with the commentary on - as archaeologists well know, sometimes there are nuggets among the trash; of course, it's a lot cheaper with rented movies!

I shall first say that I was pleasantly surprised by the additional information and coherence that a second viewing of Avatar afforded (although the particulars would betray the plot too much). I may actually read the novelization of the movie for the extra anthropological/linguistic/historical information. What most interested me, of course, was the alien language, Na'vi, which was constructed with care by an accredited linguist. One thing that irks me about poorly written fantasy novels, such as that written by Tolstoy's great-greandson, even more than the hackneyed plots is the lack of effort which goes into the creation of believable languages. I would not expect anyone to top Tolkien, a genuine language professor, but it seems to me that if you wain the want to use a fictional language and are uninterested  in the details, you should crib a grammar of a real, possibly obscure, language rather than half-heartedly attempting to make one up, or else settle on differences in dialect and prosody to distinguish your fantasy races.

I was pleased at the extensive (for a film) use of Na'vi, by characters who would find it useful or necessary, even if the biosphere (and language) seemed a bit "It was raining on Mongo that day". Soldiers and anthropologists have competing but compelling reasons to learn the native tongue. Once I had seen Avatar once, I looked up the Na'vi language on Wikipedia, and was pleased and amused to see the list of features which were combined to form a language which humans could learn, but was unlike any human language. Na'vi features clusivity (which would make some the insider/outsider dialog of the movie particularly interesting), three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, and trial), Celtic-like lenition, Russian-like short forms (in combination with lenition!), Algonquin-style infixation, the bane of the English settlers of the New World. One can sympathize with the complaints of the protagonist about the difficulties of learning Na'vi! This particular combination of features renders the language natural but not transparent, which is one of the risks of a lazy movie linguist. The lyrics of the songs were in Na'vi, no doubt inspired by the use of Quenya and Sindarin in the LOTR movie trilogy, although there are songwriters here and there who have felt moved to sing in a language of their own. I would be interested to see the dialog of the Na'vi-speaking actors, since the use of clusivity and "attitude" infixes would make the disposition and political orientation of the Na'vi actors much clearly in their native tongue.