Kaltxì, ma frapo.

I hope you’ve all had an appropriately fun and spooky Halloween, and that November has started out well for you. Ulte ayngeyä tìmweypeyri irayo seiyi oe nìtxan.

I’ve finally replied to the comments I received on the last post—take a look when you can, as there are a couple of new vocabulary items there that you may find useful.

And here, for those who missed it, I’m finally posting the video of my Na’vigation talk from a few months back, which Tekre provided in a form that mercifully eliminated the technical glitches that were entirely my own fault. Irayo nìtxan, ma tsmuk!

The video is available on Google Drive here.

(If there’s any problem with the link, please let me know.)

As you’ll see, the talk was especially targeted to those of you who have created, or are thinking of creating, your own constructed language. The examples I gave, however, are largely from Na’vi.

One new thing in this talk was a brief discussion of orthography—that is, writing systems. So let me say a few things—or rather, ask you a few questions—about orthography as it relates to Na’vi.

For convenience, here are the relevant PowerPoint slides:

Orthography slides–4 Aug 2024

Some questions to think about:

A. Of the five types of orthographies mentioned—alphabets, abugidas, abjads, syllabaries, and logographic systems—which do you think works the best for Na’vi? Why?

B. In particular, what about a syllabic system for Na’vi? Syllabaries work very well for Japanese. Would they work for Na’vi too? (Hint: What is the significance of the number 8,690?)

C. The standard alphabetic system we use to write Na’vi is of course a modified form of the Roman alphabet. In most cases, there’s a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol: each distinctive sound is mapped onto one written symbol, and each written symbol is mapped onto one distinctive sound. But there are exceptions: the digraphs. These are pairs of letters that correspond to single consonants. The Na’vi digraphs are ng, ts, kx, px, and tx (and in Reef Na’vi, ch and sh).

For many, digraphs are unappealing—partly for logical or aesthetic reasons (“Why should a single sound need two letters?”) but also because of possible ambiguities. Think of English words like “mishap” and “cathouse” and you’ll see the problem.

Some of you may recall that early on, there were two proposed Roman alphabetic systems for Na’vi—the one we have now, which we can call the “popular” system, and one that eliminated some of the digraphs, which we can call the “scientific” system.

In the scientific system, the ts sound was written as c. Since c is not otherwise used in Na’vi, this is perfectly possible. And in fact some earth languages use c in exactly this way, so there’s ample precedent for this usage.

Also, the ng sound—the velar nasal—was written simply as g. Since g by itself is not used in Na’vi, this works well. And as with c, there is precedent in earth languages for this usage. (Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, is actually pronounced “Pango Pango.”)

All this being said, the scientific system was not successful and died out quickly. Why do you think that happened?

Hayalovay, ma eylan.