navi1-1 Exercise 2: Origin and Spelling ======================================== Who and why ----------- Na'vi was made by the linguist Paul Frommer, hired by James Cameron's production team to build a language for the people of Pandora in the film Avatar (2009). Cameron had written about thirty words; Frommer built the sounds, word-building rules and grammar around them. The purpose is dramatic: a language that sounds right in actors' mouths and does not sound like English. A priori or a posteriori? ------------------------- A priori. It is built from scratch, not from the words of an existing language. (An a posteriori language, such as Esperanto, borrows its words from natural languages.) Which could not be Na'vi? ------------------------- bado NOT Na'vi: it has b and d, and Na'vi has no b, d or g. txon possible: tx is one of the ejectives (a popped t). kela possible: only letters that Na'vi uses. giga NOT Na'vi: it has g, and Na'vi has no g. (Whether a possible-looking word actually exists is a separate question; here we only test the letters, as Chapter 2 will do in more detail.)