Barsoomian & _John Carter_

After my last post on Disney's Conlangs, I was reminded that there is another Disney movie (not a cartoon, but still a Disney movie) that features a conlang: John Carter (of Mars) (as usual, this and other Amazon links are affiliate links, so I get a cut if you buy the stuff).

Barsoomian was originally a fictional language used in Edgar Rice Burroughs (better known as the author of Tarzan)'s Barsoom novels.

Side note: a fictional language is a language which only fully exists in fiction; it cannot be learned in the real world. A conlang, on the other hand, is a real language that just happens to be artificially constructed rather than naturally evolved.

Paul Frommer, previously hired to create the Na'vi language for James Cameron's Avatar, was commissioned to develop a complete Barsoomian language from the fragments of fictional Barsoomian produced by Burroughs.

So, how does this show up in the film?

The film opens on Mars ("Barsoom"), employing a translation convention of rendering Barsooming, spoken by humanoid Red Martians, into English. The audience, however, will not necessarily know that this is a translation convention right away! The first non-English speech we are exposed to it is not Barsoomian at all, but Apache, spoken by John Carter and a group of Apache warriors as John is trying to escape from the US Army. The details of their conversation are totally irrelevant, serving only to establish that, yes, there are indeed Apaches in the area as had previously been claimed.

Upon encountering what he will later learn is called a "Thern" in a cave, John, and the audience, hears our first example of alien language: the command words to activate a transport amulet, "Ock ohem ocktei wies". The individual words are never translated, as the structure of the phrase is unimportant--all we need to know is that that whole phrase is how you activate the amulet. Interestingly, because we don't encounter those words elsewhere, and we know that Therns are not restricted to living on Mars, it's entirely possible that this is not even Barsoomian!

After John is transported to Mars, we hear quite a bit of Barsoomian spoken by the Tharks, which John Carter does not understand. All of this, however, is translated for the audience in subtitles, which sets up some subtle dramatic irony and would be more difficult to do in written media. Early on, however, there is an excellent example of people with different languages attempting to work out how to communicate when Tars Tarkas introduces himself to John, and falls victim to the "gavagai" problem when he misinterprets "Virginia" as being John's name (when in fact John was trying to explain where he is from). On one of the other hands, however, Tars is successfully able to teach John the Barsoomian word for "jump"--"sak"--through the use of iconic gestures. It's a little bit unfortunate, actually, that this whole conversation is subtitled in English, as it would be really neat to try to take the audience along with John's thought process in trying to interpret Tars's four-armed gestures!

We then cut to Dejah Thoris, Red Martian and Princess of Helium, who appears to be speaking English, re-establishing the translation convention used in the introductory scenes. John in fact does not interact with any Red Martians until after going through the Thark hatchling initiation ritual, which involves drinking something which gives him the "Voice of Barsoom", allowing him to understand the Tharks. At that point, the cinematic translation convention is extended to the Tharks as well, and we hear no more extended speech in Barsoomian for the rest of the movie. This is narratively convenient, as it means the actors had fewer Barsoomian lines to learn and the audience isn't required to read subtitles for the entire movie, and in execution it very much resembles what Atlantis: The Lost Empire did to dispense with Atlantean--but unlike the case in Atlantis, this sci-fi conceit actually has a larger narrative purpose, as it serves to explain why Mars has a single universal language--nobody has to learn it, it is merely imposed pharmacologically. (Which really must make things a lot easier for Martian parents!)

As a result, only Tharks are ever shown actually speaking fluent Barsoomian. Which is kinda racist, but it's racist against fictional aliens who are not obviously coded to correspond with any human culture, so I guess that's OK? I suppose it could've been an intentional attempt to distinguish the Tharks as "more alien" than the Red Martians, but I would've thought that the simple fact that Tharks are 4-armed green giants while Red Martians are visually identical to humans would've taken care of that quite sufficiently.

Anyway, we can ultimately establish that the portrayal of Red Martians as always speaking English is a translation convention because, when Dejah Thoris arrives to interact with the Tharks, there is no language barrier, and this continue in all future interactions between Tharks, Red Martians, and Therns. And if they really were just speaking English all along, Tars Tarkas should've had no trouble communicating with John earlier on!

Even after John gains the Voice of Barsoom, however, we still get individual Barsoomian words with special cultural significance left untranslated--notably, "Jeddak" (meaning something like "chief" or "king"), which is also untranslated in the early subtitles.

We get one instance of Narrative Translation when John is given his title of Dotar Sojat:

"He will be called Dotar Sojat--my right arms!"

But even though the voice of Tars Tarkas conveys both the Barsoomian and English phrases, we can be reasonably certain that this is an artifact of the established translation convention, and "really", intrafictionally, he probably did not just repeat "Dotar Sojat--Dotar Sojat!" twice in Barsoomian.

After that, further introductions of Barsoomian words are done almost entirely with the Make it Obvious / Make it Irrelevant technique:

Obvious / Irrelevant:

"you came on one of your sailing ships across millions of karads of empty space?"
Context makes it obvious that "karad" is a Barsoomian measurement of distance--exact scale being unimportant.

"Be back in one xat, John Carter of Earth."
Context makes it obvious that "xat" is a Barsoomian measurement of time--exact scale again being unimportant, although it's probably small.

"Useless she-calot."
 Obviously an animal, and obviously an insult.

"I'd rather you died in the arms of the Goddess than as food for wild banths in the arena."
Again, obviously the name of some Martian animal.

The Barsoomian names of the Martian moons are introduced such that the visual, rather than purely linguistic, context makes their referents obvious:

"Cluros and Thuria. They should be at our backs by now." (spoken with a brief cut to zoom in on the moons in the sky)

This also serves as a weak form of foreshadowing, for when "Barsoom's first lovers, Cluros and Thuria" are referenced during the wedding scene, again with the moons visible in that scene.

"Thern" is kind of a special case. John meets a Thern before even getting to Mars, but doesn't know that that's what it is. John hears the word "Thern" when Dejah Thoris guesses that he is one, and just rolls with it. The meaning is not immediately obvious, but that's OK, because the audience is only as confused as John, our proxy viewpoint character, is--and this confusion establishes a minor thread of narrative tension. Eventually, that tension is resolved with explicit definition: "Therns are holy messengers of the Goddess."

Incidentally, when we see written Thern symbols at the Gates of Issus, they look heavily reminiscent of cuneiform, which is consistent with establishing their ancient presence on Earth as well as Mars.

If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation.

The Linguistically Interesting Media Index

Disney's Conlangs

 When I found out that David J. Peterson was working on the new Disney film Raya and the Last Dragon (as usual, note that links to media are affiliate links, so I make some money if you go buy that film), I thought "I am definitely going to have to watch that to see how much conlangy content ends up in the final cut!"

And then it came out. And I saw it. And I could not think of of a single interesting thing to say about it until I realized that the linguistic content of Raya has to be evaluated in the context of Disney's previous foray into conlangery: Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Atlantis

Atlantis was one of my favorite Disney movies as a tweenager because it has a frickin' linguist as a main character! And there are giant submarines! How cool is that! And it actually has decent representation of the Atlantean language, constructed by Marc Okrand of Klingon fame. In fact, the opening sequence of the movie, showing the sinking of Atlantis, is entirely in subtitled Atlantean--a thing that you can do in a movie, which is much harder to pull off in literature!

In retrospect, however, this is a little surprising, because it is, after all, a Disney movie, largely targeted at kids, and a significant portion of the audience for this movie would be pre-literate--i.e., not helped by subtitles. Thus, it is useful to note that, in every case where subtitling is used for Atlantean, the actual semantic content of the speech is completely unnecessary to understand what is going on (i.e., it's an Easter egg for literate viewers), or the meaning is made obvious in other ways. "Making it Obvious" is in fact used at the end of that opening sequence when young Kida calls out to her mother with the word "mahtim"--it's a child speaking, the word kinda sounds similar to "mother", she is calling to her mother, it's not hard to infer that "mahtim" means "mother". And that will actually become relevant later in the movie--so they focused on that specific word in isolation at the end of the scene in a very rudimentary instance of Teaching the Reader (or viewer, in this case). Specifically, we hear the word "mahtim" again (and again, in isolation, and again, spoken by Kida--the film makers really maximized the parallels between usages to trigger the viewers' memory) when Kida sees the Heart of Atlantis.

In all other instance of extended Atlantean, the important narrative content is conveyed entirely by emotional inflection, or the important concepts are re-explained later; e.g., the king's conversation with Kida in which he makes his dislike of the expedition obvious is in Atlantean... but then he talks with the expedition in English, and gets across the same plot-relevant points. Additionally, that whole sequence is summed up by Milo after the fact.

Another particularly interesting use of subtitled Atlantean comes up just before Kida goes to merge with the Heart, and says "All will be well Milo. Be not afraid." The (literate) audience understands this, via subtitles, because Milo understands it--but Rourke asks Milo what she said (and Milo lies about it) in order to make it clear to that same audience that the rest of the characters do not understand, thus setting up some dramatic irony.

Elsewhere, however, the movie also makes use of Narrative Translation--which fits in because Milo's whole reason for being on the expedition is to act as a translator! So, it is quite natural that we should see (and hear) him actually doing some translating. E.g., Milo reads haltingly from the Shepherd's Journal, and then immediately provides the English translation "Enter the lair of the Leviathan, there you will find the path to the gateway." for his Anglophone companions.

Unfortunately, we don't get nearly as much of this as we could have, because the writers quickly establish that the Atlanteans can magically speak English (or French) whenever they feel like it, due to Atlantean being a "root dialect". This is a fantastical bit of linguistic science fiction, the idea of which could probably be entertainingly explored by a sufficiently skilled writer... but Atlantis's writers end up just using at nothing more than a cheap excuse to not have the Atlanteans actually speaking Atlantean all the time.

Later on, we get some somewhat clumsier instances of Narrative Translation with Kida code-switching to Atlantean for one word ("...since the time of the Mehbelmok."), which Milo translates for the audience ("Oh, the Great Flood."), and then Milo again reading from the Shepherd's Journal while Kida translates into English ("Follow the narrow passage for another league. There, you will find the fifth marker.")

Interestingly, we also get one instance earlier in the movie of Audrey code-switching into Spanish with "No toques nada! I'll be right back." And there're a few lines in French.

The sequel movie Milo's Return is incredibly disappointing, and we can probably all just agree to act like it never happened, but it does open with subtitled Norwegian.

Atlantis also makes fairly extensive use of the constructed Atlantean alphabet in its graphic design (a feature which also shows up in the TV series Defiance, which I suppose I shall have to analyze at some point now), although in retrospect the alphabet itself is really not that great; it is an even closer cipher for the English Latin alphabet than Star Wars's aurebesh script; there are three extra characters for common English digraphs, but they are more complex than the basic 26 Latin-equivalent characters, obviously setting them apart. Why would Atlanteans who have no idea what sounds English would later decide to use digraphs for arrange their writing system that way?

Raya

Raya's use of a conlang is a stark contrast. Unlike Atlantis, in which the languages the audience hears are the languages which the characters are speaking within the fictional world, Raya is more similar to Kill the Beast (or The Lord of the Rings, for that matter) in that it appears to use a consistent translation convention in which the primary language of the characters is represented as English for the audience, except when key phrases are allowed to show through for worldbuilding flavor. Also unlike Atlantean in Atlantis, there is only one extended text in Kumandran featured in Raya, which is left untranslated in subtitles, giving the linguistically-interested audience no inroads to analyzing it. Specifically, it's Raya's song / prayer when she is trying to summon Sisu at the end of the river:

Suvaa de draa sim
Mandra de draa lim
Bavaa de draa Tomben

Every other usage of Kumandran is in the form of single words (or a two-word phrase), used in Making it Obvious contexts--and there really aren't very many of them. Leaving out proper names, I'm pretty sure this is a complete list:

"And it's either 'Father' or 'Ba' to you." (This could be considered Narrative Translation. Remaining usages of "Ba" omitted.)

"Come with me, dep la. I wanna show you something."
"Thank you, dep la. You've been very helpful."
"What's drippin', dep la?"
"Did you need that, dep la?"

The phrase "dep la" is always used in a vocative context, so it's obviously a term of address--the first usage is friendly and the remainder are all obviously sarcastic, so probably a term of endearment for a friend.

"The rest of them are being held by a bunch of no-good binturis."
"Binturi? That's not a very nice way to describe an old friend."

This exchange is almost beating you over the head with the fact that "binturi" is an insult. And then it gets used a lot more in rapid succession, just to drive that home, and make sure you remember it for the rest of the movie.

"Toi, that's a lot of jade!"
"Congees have 9 stomachs!" -- "Oh, toi..."
"Of course you love mango! Only a tongueless cretin wouldn't!" -- "Oh, toi!"

And that is every usage of "toi", which is fairly obviously a generic interjection.

Compared to Atlantis, it seems that Raya is trying to discard the subtitling convention that works so well for adult-targeted films in order to level the viewing experience across age levels; not merely do children get to enjoy the story fully, but adults don't get any extra Easter eggs. That's a fine approach to take, but I would have really liked to see better deployment of Narrative Translation or other techniques to better showcase the language that they paid someone to make! The language also does not really significantly impact the movie's graphic design--Kumandra is clearly a literate society (the plot relies on a scroll to direct Raya to Sisu, after all), and it would've been nice to see more evidence of that.

One thing that Raya does considerably better than Atlantis, however, is presenting a unified naming culture. Atlantis probably could've done the same, but didn't really get a chance to, since we only meet a very limited cast of named Atlantean characters. Every character in Raya, however, comes from a single ancestral culture speaking a common language, and the design of the names is consistent within themselves and with what little is shown of the sound of that language. And that alone is enough to justify hiring a language consultant to produce a simple naming language.

If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation.

The Linguistically Interesting Media Index

Why Disney's _Luca_ is Bad, Actually

 Yeah, it's clickbait, but don't blame me--you clicked it!

Luca is a fun movie. My kids wanted to watch it three times, and I liked it too. But there's one thing I just can't get past: it uses a secondary language, and it does so badly.

The primary narrative language is... well, it's whatever you happened to watch it in, because Disney does a lot of translations, but I watched it in English. However, the story is set in Italy, and it uses Italian as a secondary language which the audience is not required to understand in order to better develop that setting, with the appearance of a standard translation convention to make the intrafictionally-Italian-speaking characters comprehensible to the English-speaking audience. This is essentially the same situation we find Kill the Beast with respect to French. The characters are "really" speaking the secondary language, but we hear it (or read it) as English except for occasional instances where the "real" language is exposed to remind us that a conventional translation is happening.

Despite being a film rather than a book, Luca even uses exactly the expected techniques for linguistic worldbuilding, in line with my previous typology: every instance of Italian in the English version of the film (both spoken and in in-world writing) is either an instance of Make It Obvious (primarily used in the case of "what's wrong with you, stupido"), Make It Irrelevant, or Make It an Easter Egg (with one ambiguous case of narrative translation, when Luca sees the Vespa poster and says "freedom", which may or may not be him reading off the Italian text). If you happen to know that all of Giulia's expletives are references to cheese, that's fun, but if you don't understand a single word of Italian besides stupido, you're not missing anything important--you're just being subtly reminded of the setting. And you even get explicit acknowledgment that understanding the Italian is unimportant, because this is a movie, and they could have actually subtitled it--but the Italian is never translated in the subtitles.

But, all this work is ruined by the fact that the translation convention is inconsistent. Just consider: do the sea monsters speak Italian? Clearly, they speak the same language as the humans, as no sea monsters have any trouble communicating and blending in with humans once they come onto land. However, the sea monsters never speak spontaneous Italian. Only humans are allowed to have their underlying Italian revealed. Sea monsters only ever quote Italian words, and are consistently shown as not understanding it; e.g., Luca and Alberto clearly don't know what stupido means (although Luca quickly picks up that it's actually something bad), nor do they understand Alberto's catchphrase "Piacere, Girolamo Trombetta." ("Pleased to meet you, Twisty Trombone").

But if the sea monsters don't speak Italian... are we really supposed to believe that all of these mid-century small-town Italians are just consistently speaking Italian-accented English as their primary language amongst themselves are occasionally throwing in Italian phrases for spice intrafictionally? I find that... implausible.

So, Luca and language? Excellent example of what not to do.

If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation.

The Linguistically Interesting Media Index