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Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

I wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced gibberish for movies. We could preserve languages for posteriority and the result would be more realistic.

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By that logic, movies should just use existing props or set designs rather than creating any new artifacts.

Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.

However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of the things that was great about, for example, the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).

Similarly, the video game Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."

I mean, filming on location as opposed to on a studio sound stage or lot has often been favored by audiences and directors for greater authenticity, even when it's Vancouver masquerading as another city or Tunisia masquerading as Tattoine. And I don't think anybody is suggesting that conlanging isn't "a legitimate artform like anything else," just that it's duplicating effort. Remember "don't repeat yourself"?

> Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea

Interesting tidbit! I had thought they were all artificial.

Can you provide a source for this? I'm very curious, as I grew up speaking Tok Pisin, and played some Riven, and looking up cutscenes online I can't make sense of any of the Rivenese (well, the foreign language bits, I don't know if it's Rivenese or not), at least not in https://youtu.be/-rjfyfuijrc or https://youtu.be/smOzKs1hauM.

You would not be preserving anything, you'd be stomping on a culture. Old and lesser known languages are rarely well researched. You're lucky if you have morphosyntax written down.

But the moment you start using existing language in a new context, you get into issues. You've got words and whole concepts missing that you have to add to something that's more or less complete.

Dothraki needs horse-related words. You need to be able to express certain social concepts that are unique to this fantasy culture.

So you set up to build this words and phrases. You derive phonotactics of a real language and patch it with your stuff. Now you've got new language based on an existing one. So you didn't preserve anything. And if I were a user of the originl lang, I'd be upset you appropriated and twisted it.

It might encourage a few people to learn the real language spoken in the movie instead of a conlang which nobody ever spoke outside the movie. The time and effort expended by Star Trek fans learning Klingon might be better spent learning Basque, Cornish, Abkhaz, Etruscan, or Sumerian. They'd learn a language with speakers and/or literature, and if the language is still spoken contribute to its continuity.

This seems to be one of those "why don't you just be productive?" arguments, which tends to miss the point of why someone did something to begin with. There's a reason Star Trek fans learn Klingon and not a real language, they're fascinated with Klingons but not a real culture, so the energy to learn, say, Basque, was never there to begin with.

I feel similar with history, if I am just doing it for entertainment I'd much rather learn a constructed history rather than the real one.

But if Klingon had just been Basque, then they would have been learning two cultures at once. Ironically it's cultural hegemony from evil empires that real hurts these minority human languages.

Adding non-existent words to a language is not twisting it, it's developing it, like normal languages evolve over time. I'm assuming for any language that is chosen we would have enough writing to know the grammar and structures, so I feel like adding words is not a big deal. You did basically preserve a large part of the language though, even if it's had words added.

This is not correct. Language is much more than words. At times you have social structure encoded e.g. via honorifics. You have concepts and phrases that derive from previous experiences.

Whether you take Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for granted or you think that its inverse is true, cultures and languages codevelop.

You wouldn't say "keep them at the bay" in a language used by a land-locked people. You won't call tomato "pomodoro" if gold in your area doesn't have impurites that make it red and not yellow.

You have to understand that language on a very basic level is a construct of a culture that used it. You can't separate them.

And then there are practical reasons. You won't get actors to learn Mongolic language to play Dothraki. Conlangs aim to combine "alien" with "familiar" which is a must in a movie, game or a book.

> You wouldn't say "keep them at the bay" in a language used by a land-locked people.

If you mean to reference the expression “keep someone at bay” (no “the”) with the meaning of holding them back, that comes from “bay” as in “the howling bark of hounds” rather than “bay” as in “a partially enclosed body of water attached to a larger area”. Completely separate etymology (from old French «bay» and «baie», respectively, ending up in words that happen to be spelled the same in English.)

So, a fine idiom for a landlocked people, not so good for a people without dogs.

It seems more culture impacts language, you don't have social structures that are created in language and implemented in culture later. I agree it's a construct of culture though, but I don't know that adding words is necessarily bad.

Why would actors learn a language when they can just learn their lines? If you're already borrowing concepts from other languages why not the whole thing. I don't know if conlangs are better, but I don't think it would be unethical to use an existing ancient language for a movie or TV show.

I can give you a really good example of that. The languages created for FarCry Primal are based on Proto-Indo-European [1]. I didn't know that at the time I was playing the game, but the more I played the more I got captivated by those languages, since a lot of words sounded familiar. And indeed after doing the research I discovered that they are based on the real ancestor for Indo-European languages. Congrats to Ubisoft for pulling this off.

[1] https://www.player.one/far-cry-primal-interview-how-ubisoft-...

The movie Prometheus was also somewhat famous in linguistics circles for attempting to use either reconstructed PIE directly or potentially a modified proto-Sanskrit for the Engineer.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008

> I wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced gibberish for movies.

John Kani, a veteran South African actor playing King T'Chaka in the Marvel movies "Captain America: Civil War" and "Black Panther", decided to speak the Wankandan language parts in Xhosa, a South African language that he is a native speaker of. He taught the rest of the cast their lines. I think it sounded realistic.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/john-kani-influenced-the-bla...

https://qz.com/1192662/black-panther-wakandas-language-is-is...

And be accused of cultural appropriation?

Why not just work with the few last speakers / experts on the culture and language so that it's not offensive?

A lot of those people are proud of their language and would like to see it live and thrive again.

Is language really something that can be appropriated though?

I'll just refer you to the relevant /r/conlangs discussion on this, rather than repeat the same arguments back to you:

https://reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8wjs73/is_there_a_cit...

I'd love to hear Lojban in a mainstream movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

Bonus points if it's sold as random fantasy language of a strange country and the main cast doesn't understand it either.

Lojban is so big, you could create different cultures simply by omitting or making mandatory different bits. This group doesn't use rafsi but evidentials are mandatory; that group doesn't use any of the time-space marking but the other does, etc.

Not quite a movie but having Lojban as the setting fantasy language is the idea behind this new production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kJATTd6vF8

Sometimes they do. Also, an interest in one seems to closely overlap an interest in the other.

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