One of the most disappointing aspects of the Star Wars franchise is the laziness of the approach to language. As background noise, the pastiche of assorted noises and bits and pieces of real languages works reasonably well, but the issues of multilinguality and translation are never addressed. Somehow, Han Solo and Greedo understand one another just fine. It’s silly, and it goes beyond my ability to suspend disbelief.
Numerous other sci-fi shows and movies at least address the issue, even if this only amounts to asserting the existence of a hugely implausible universal translation technology.
In some cases, people go so far as to create a language. Klingon is probably the most famous example. I say probably because James Cameron commissioned a language for the Thundercat Smurfs to speak in Avatar. Perhaps you’ve heard of this movie, Avatar? I understand there have been some advertisements for it as of late.
Anyway, the creator of Thundersmurf has written up a short description of the language as a guest post at language log. The structure of the language is reasonably interesting, and it seems to do a good job balancing, as Ben Zimmer puts it (again with the NY Times link), the need “to be exotic enough for audiences to recognize its alienness but not so exotic that it was beyond the ability of human actors to articulate.”
The next sentence gets under my skin a bit: “Despite the much-heralded visual effects of “Avatar,” Cameron insisted that the sounds of [Thundersmurf] speech remain unmanipulated.” Now, the fact that almost every alien in Star Trek is just a person with some kind of funny forehead I can accept. I understand that it was, at least originally, a conscious choice on the part of Gene Rodenberry to ensure that actors playing the aliens could emote sucessfully, but I can easily imagine that budget constraints and special effects limitations played a role, as well. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that budget constraints and special effects limitations didn’t play much of a role in any aspect of Avatar.
With $250 million to play with, why are the Thundersmurfs so humanoid? And why, to get finally to the point, are their vocal tracts and associated control systems not just humanoid, but, apparently, completely human? It just so happens that aliens from some far away planet speak a language the same way humans do?
Ben Zimmer contends that it is in “linguistically credible interactions” such as “human characters with varying proficiency in [Thundersmurf]” and “an experienced botanist school[ing] an eager young scientist in the finer points of conversational [Thundersmurf]” that Avatar “may make its biggest contribution to science fiction.” Given that the plot seems to be a high-tech mashup of Fern Gully and Dances With Wolves (and is maybe really just about white guilt), Avatar’s fancy linguistics’ only competition is the ultra-fancy special effects, contribution-to-sci-fi-wise.
I suppose that the Thundersmurfs are so humanoid (and tall and pretty) because it would be hard for audiences to relate to Noble Savages that were truly alien. I know it’s no news flash that movies are emotionally manipulative, nor that emotional manipulation sells tickets, but it seems to me that Avatar represents a lost opportunity to do something really interesting with sci-fi in general, and with “xenophonetics” specifically.
At the very least, they could have produced some really top-notch technobabble for the scenes showing humans learning how to control their avatars’ utterly inhuman “speech” organs.
[cross posted at Language Module]