Alien/made-up languages

In books/movies with alien languages, is there typically any sort of structure behind the languages like with Star Trek’s Klingon and LOTR’s elvish, or are most of them just gibberish? In Star Wars, for example, there seem to be a lot of different languages, but I’ve never heard of any uber-nerd bragging they can speak Hutt or Rodian or whatever.

To start off, another example I can remember is Out of the Silent Planet’s Malcandra language. It didn’t explore it enough for the reader to start speaking it, but it explored some of the grammar and pronunciation.

It depends on the author. Tolkien was a linguist, so elvish has a real structure behind it. Klingon was gibberish at first, but some fans of the show with backgrounds in linguistics fleshed it out.

There are two sets of glyphs in Futurama which are translatable to English but AFAIK those are more along the lines of a code or cipher (one-to-one English to glyph substitution) as opposed to a true language.

Diane Duane in her Romulan-themed Star Trek books created a lot of “Rihannsu” words and includes a glossary in “The Romulan Way” but it’s not a full language.

Another ST book (can’t recall the title, it’s supposed to be a novel-within-a-novel about a Klingon captain) has some Klingon cuss words that I still find myself spewing every so often. Dunno if they’re part of the “official” Klingon language though.

Actually, Kingon was developed by a linguist hired by the studio. He also developed Vulcan and the Atlantean language from Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Tolkien was an uber-geek when it came to languages. That’s pretty much how Arda and Middle-Earth got created. He invented the language, because he liked doing that, and then he invented the people who spoke it, and then he had to invent their history, their neighbors, their neighbors’ languages, their geography, their customs, etc etc etc.

Ardalambion is a great site for insight into Tolkien’s languages.

C. S. Lewis was good buddies with Tolkien, and they shared their early essays with each other, and challenged each other (and other colleagues) to come up with stories. C. S. Lewis was also a gifted linguist.

His name was Mark Okrand if anyone wants to look him up.

I think that in Star Wars they used actual planet Earth languages, other than English of course. They simpy took a known language, but one that was spoken in a limited geographic area so that it would appear foreign to most people.

Close, but not quite. Jimmy Doohan (Scotty) created the Klingon heard in ST: TMP and then, in ST: TWOK, Marc Okrand was brought in to give it actual grammar and structure.

If I remember correctly, it’s based largely on German and what we know of Aztec.

Ubergeeky nitpick: “What we know of Aztec” is quite a bit, given that the Aztec language was Nahuatl, which is still spoken, usually bilingually with Spanish, by over a million people in Mexico. That mix, though, sounds …

[Spock voice]
fascinating!
[/Spock voice] :wink:

Kingon trivia: when the creator was making it up, just be weird he didn’t have a the verb “to be”. But then he had to backpeddle for the “Shakespeare in the original Klingon” bit in STVI.

I heard there was some thought put into the language in “The 5th element”, but I don’t know if it was linguisticly rigid.

Lando’s co-pilot in ROTJ spoke some real Earth language (southeast Asian but I don’t remeber the language) When the movie was shown in that country/region, the people were surpised. What he said was something like “I am fine, how are you” or some other common phrase but not something that fit in the scene.

Brian

I believe Star Wars either uses unadulterated terran languages for alien languages or they occasionally fiddle with the audio (speed it up, reverse, etc.). IIRC, someone affiliated with the production of Ep. II mentions that in one of the special features on the Ep. II DVD.

Incidentally, Otto, what are those obscenities? Offhand, I can think of plakh and to’DSaH, but I don’t believe they came from the novel you mentioned (please forgive my spelling/capitalization if any is incorrect and anyone notices).

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8853/curse.html

Anyone remember Empire of the Petal Throne? That’s another world with a fully-fleshed-out language

The first one was a simple monoalphabetic substitution (which was easily cracked via frequency analysis), but the second one was a more complex cipher. (It was a modular rotating cipher, IIRC).

That’s true. It’s also interesting to note that the first language, after it was shown on the pilot, was translated less than 30 minutes after the show had finished airing by fans on the internet (it wasn’t all translated, just what symbols had been shown in the pilot.)
Oh, and N9IWP, the language used in The Fifth Element was a very rigid and complex language developed by the director and Milla Jovavich. They would call each other up and have conversations in it so that she could speak it perfectly.

“The HAL 9000 computer is going insane! Etbj!!:wink:

I have it on good authority that the Ewok language is actually Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines.

It was actually the Kikuyu language of East Africa. The line supposedly translated as, “You guys over there, come over here.”

You are wrong because I speak Tagalog and I couldn’t understand a word.

I’ve often wondered what languages were spoken in movies like the new version of The Mummy or Stargate. Was that supposed to be ancient Egyptian?

Also, the languages spoken by the African people in the old Tarzan movies–were they real or just stuff like “oogah-boogah”?