Applied Languages

Most cinemas in Spain’s northeast Catalonia region stayed shut Monday to protest a proposed law that would force them to show 50 per cent of foreign films in the local Catalan language, rather than in Spanish, an industry group said.

The vast majority of movies in Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, are shown dubbed into Spanish, while Catalan-dubbed films represent just 3 per cent of the market, said Pilar Sierra, secretary general of the Catalan Cinema Company Guild, which called the protest.

The regional government says the legislation being debated in the regional parliament promotes the Catalan language.

Catalonia prides itself on having a distinct culture and language. Spanish and Catalan are the region’s two official languages but the government’s linguistic policies in recent years, such as obliging all school and university teaching to be conducted in Catalan, has been criticized by some who claim it discriminates against other Spaniards.

The guild argues that quotas would likely worsen the sector’s economic problems.

The law will make it hard for theatres showing films in Catalan to attract moviegoers and this will lead to closures and job losses, Sierra said.

“We’re in favour of promoting more films in Catalan, but not by imposition,” said Sierra, adding that the bill proposes fines of up to C75,000 ($104,000) for violations.

She added that U.S. films account for 80 per cent of those seen in Catalonia and that the guild believes major U.S. distributors would likely send in fewer films to avoid the extra bother and expense of dubbing them into both Spanish and Catalan.

The strike is expected to be heeded by the guild’s 70 theatres, which operate 525 of the region’s 740 screens.

The regional government hopes to pass the law before elections are called later this year in Catalonia.

Read more: The Canadian Press

It all started with what Professor Paul Frommer now describes as a “fateful e-mail.” The linguistics expert from the University of Southern California is the brains behind the language used by James Cameron’s 10-foot-tall alien tribe in the much-anticipated science fiction epic, Avatar.

“Jim Cameron’s production department at Lightstorm Entertainment was looking for a linguist that would be able to help him develop an alien language,” explains Professor Frommer. “At that time, it wasn’t even called Avatar - it was project 880 - but the e-mail was forwarded to me and I saw it and jumped on it.”

The pair worked together for four years to develop the Na’vi language. The director had already come up with about thirty words, for the characters’ names and body parts. But he was looking to the professor to give the language an authentic but exotic feel.

Crucially, it had to be a language that could be articulated. “This is an alien language but obviously it has to be spoken by human actors,” explains Professor Frommer. “It has to be sounds that human beings are comfortable producing.”

It is a unique language, with its own syntactic and grammatical rules. Its creator says some of Cameron’s original words had “a vaguely Polynesian feel”. Others have suggested that it sounds like German or Japanese. “It certainly borrows various grammatical structures, sounds, that exist in other languages - but what I hope is that the combination in this language is unique,” says Professor Frommer.

As well as creating the language, Professor Frommer taught the actors how to speak it. “I met with each of the seven principal actors who use the language beforehand. I helped them with the pronunciation, we broke things down. Professor Frommer spent hours on the set, helping the cast fine tune their alien language speaking abilities. “I gave them quite a challenge. I found that they really rose to the occasion, everybody had a great time. I knew that it had to be something that actors could deal with and handle,” he says.

The language currently runs to about a thousand words. It does not have a huge vocabulary, but Professor Frommer is still working at it. He is also still trying to master his own language. “I wish I could speak it fluently,” he says. “As for who at this point understands the grammar and such, I think probably I’m the only one. I wish that eventually that might not be the case.”

In fact, one day, Professor Frommer hopes Na’vi will match Klingon, as the “gold standard” alien language. “There’s a translation of Hamlet into Klingon,” says Professor Frommer. “There are Klingon clubs that meet all over the world. There are a very dedicated group of people who meet and try to speak it.

“If anything happened like this with Na’vi I’d be delighted.”

Read more: BBC News

Cambodia’s “jungle woman”, whose story gripped the country after she apparently spent 18 years living in a forest, has begun speaking normally instead of making animal-type noises, her father said.

Rochom P’ngieng, now 28, went missing as a little girl in 1989 while herding water buffalo in Ratanakkiri province around 600 kilometres (400 miles) northeast of the capital Phnom Penh.

In early 2007 the woman was brought from the jungle, naked and dirty, after being caught trying to steal food from a farmer. She was hunched over like a monkey, scavenging on the ground for pieces of dried rice.

She could not utter a word of any intelligible language, instead making what Sal Lou, the man who says he is her father, calls “animal noises.”

Cambodians described her as “jungle woman” and “half-animal girl” and since rejoining society Rochom P’ngieng has battled bouts of illness and was hospitalised in October after refusing food.

But Sal Lou said late Wednesday that this month his daughter had started to understand Cambodia’s Khmer language and could even speak the language of his ethnic Phnong tribe.

“She is becoming a normal human being like others. She has been starting to speak out now — she speaks the language of Phnong,” Sal Lou told AFP by telephone. “She can ask for food, water and so on when she feels hungry,” he said.

The apparent breakthrough happened after Rochom P’ngieng’s hospitalization, when doctors gave her injections to treat a nervous illness for a few days, Sal Lou said. “She is very gentle and I am very happy with her progress,” he said adding that her condition appears to be improving from day to day.

Sal Lou said his daughter had stopped trying to flee into the jungle as she had in the past. “Even though we tried to take her into jungle, she wanted to stay at home,” he said, adding that she is able to eat food now.

The jungles of Ratanakkiri — some of the most isolated and wild in Cambodia — are known to have held hidden groups of hill tribes in the recent past. In November 2004, 34 people from four hill tribe families emerged from the dense forest where they had fled in 1979 after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which they supported.

Read more: AFP

The word ’simples’ is poised to gain an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary thanks to a television advertising campaign starring an animated meerkat. The slogan has been named word of the year by the compilers of the OED.

The wordsmiths admitted the campaign by meerkat Aleksandr for a price comparison website helped push the word ’simples’ into everyday conversation in Britain. Susie Dent, of Oxford University Press and a regular on Dictionary Corner on Channel 4 series Countdown, selected her pick of the year for 2009. She said: ‘One word that seems to have captured the public’s imagination in 2009 is the word “simples”.

‘It has appeared on the ‘compare the meerkat’ TV adverts and has quickly become a catchphrase said by anyone when they mean something that is very easy to achieve.’

Elsewhere in 2008, the world economic crisis provided the phrase ‘credit crunch’ and this year it has been followed up by ‘the great recession’ said the OED. It has also given rise to the phenomenon of the Zombie Bank, a financial institution whose liabilities are more than its assets but can keep going thanks to taxpayer bailouts.

Lack of money also created the ’staycation’ which means a holiday in the UK rather than abroad. This was boosted by the Met Office promising a ‘barbecue summer’ which failed to materialise, yet the phrase itself has ended 2009 as one of the words or phrases of the year.

Social networking has provided the language with the verb to ‘defriend’ - or ‘unfriend’ to Americans - which means to take someone off a list of friends on Facebook.

And then there is ‘Tweetup’, a play on ‘meet up’ where people get together physically after contacting each other on the social networking site Twitter.

The words will not immediately get in to the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but go on a ‘waiting list’ with other phrases like jeggings - a mix of jeans and leggings. Compilers from Oxford University Press, publishers of the OED, wait to see if the new words and phrases become permanent fixtures in the language or if they simply disappear again.

Others on the waiting list include ‘paywalls’ - part of a website which is not accessible without paying a subscription’. And from the great MPs’ expenses scandal comes ‘redact’, an old word meaning to censor or obscure and resurrected to describe the habit of blocking out ’sensitive’ information on what politicians bought with taxpayers’ money.

Miss Dent added: ‘Only a tiny percentage of words will ever gain entry into an Oxford dictionary and the waiting list of words is long.’

Top 10 words of 2009:
1. Simples
2. Unfriend/defriend
3. Great Recession
4. Staycation
5. Tweetup
6. Zombie Bank
7. Barbecue summer
8. Jeggings
9. Redact
10. Paywalls

Read more: Daily Mail Online

A linguist has revealed he talked only in Klingon to his son for the first three years of his life to find out if he could learn to speak the ‘language’.

Dr d’Armond Speers spent days translating phrases to communicate to his son Alec speaking like the creatures featured in space-based fantasy programme Star Trek.

The Minnesota native hoped the child’s first word would be ‘vav’ instead of ‘dad’. However, the language was problematic at this age because it lacked equivalent words for ‘bottle’ and ‘diaper’.

Despite his passion for Klingon, Speers denied he is a Star Trek fan, saying: ‘I don’t go to conventions or wear fake foreheads. I’m a linguist.

‘I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language.

‘He was definitely starting to learn it,’ he added. ‘When Alec spoke back to me in Klingon his pronunciation was excellent.’ Now 13, Speers’ son does not speak Klingon at all.

The language was developed after Spock actor Leonard Nimoy decided the creatures should have their own language. Developed by an expert, Klingon has 21 consonants, five vowels and is the most spoken fictional language in the world.

Read more: Daily Mail