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.
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