Kay(f)bop(t) succeeds amazingly at what it was designed for, being a collection of several linguistic jokes and overall parody of conlangs. I assume it succeeds at this more than Na'vi succeeds as a naturalistic artlang according to Misali, so it was ranked higher. I don't think he 'likes' Na'vi less or Kay(f)bop(t) more.
As a 10+ year Na'vi speaker, I can confidently say that your prediction at the start of the video was basically the only part you got wrong! Excellent job covering Na'vi here, you picked out a lot of the really interesting details about the language to highlight. As others have said, I would've liked to have seen the Octal system mentioned. And while you did mention syllabic consonants ("rr" and "ll") it would've been nice to see them directly. One other piece that is (perhaps a bit less) interesting is there is a vocative particle for addressing someone. "Ma" - Neytiri says this a few times in the film. The only thing I would actually correct is the whole "jakesully = moron" thing, which is a tongue in cheek addition that isn't to be taken seriously. The *actual* word for moron is "Skxawng" (which Jake says in the movie, albeit more like "skawn" in his intentionally bad pronunciation) All in all, txantsan! (Awesome!)
You're thinking of 'skxawng', which means moron. If 'jakesully' is a synonym to 'skxawng', at least in Omatikaya, I imagine this is because Jake was a moron in their eyes.
@@PwnEveryBody Seems like it would probably mean "idiot but with a connotation of affection and/or likely to cause damage to friend and foe alike; 'the right man in the wrong place.'"
When I was in high school I was briefly a Na’vi tutor. Yes really. BACKGROUND _About the Golden Mouse competition_ There is (or was?) this sort of contest called ‘The Golden Mouse’ (a.k.a. ‘The Virtual Olympics’), an annual competition for geeks held by the Tel-Aviv University and Mif‘àl haPáyis (basically the national lottery). The way the competition works is that 50-odd schools that have a building paid for by MhP gather middle school students (20-odd in total, rough assessment) who are given subjects they have to study, like math and history and some more niche subjects, under the direction of one of the teachers at the school. The students normally divide into sub-groups, each dedicated for one topic or more. After some time spent studying, they are gathered to answer those questions online within a set timeframe. After this, the 50-odd teams get whittled down to 30-odd, and the process is repeated. Those 30-odd teams are in turn whittled down to 5, which are taken (on a school day!) to TAU to hear three lectures. Then they are sent to separate rooms, where they answer questions related to those lectures. Finally, there’s a big ceremony and the top three places are announced. Now, the second stage (or sometimes the first) usually requires basic knowledge of a given languge: one time it was Old High German, another time it was Esperanto, another year it was Italian, and that’s as far as my knowledge goes. _My personal connection_ When I was 18, a loose friend of mine randomly asked me if I was familiar with the competition, and if I was willing to help her because she had to study a language for it and she knew I was a language geek. What she didn’t know was that I had competed in the competition myself twice: when I was in the eighth grade, and again the following year. The first time I was there, the language was Mandarin; six kids wanted to learn it, but they all gave up pretty quickly, and I was the only one who stuck with it. Nowadays I speak a bit of Mandarin, but I’m not remotely fluent or anything. That year we also won the competition. (The next year there was no language, and we didn’t win, but we did get to the finals.) Naturally, I was overcome with sweet nostalgia and said yes. When she told me she needed my help with learning Na’vi, I was even happier, even though I didn’t know the first thing about the language. THE PROCESS The first thing I did was tell my friend to learn to read IPA while I read about the language on Wikipedia. Then we started making little sessions on MSN Messenger, in which I taught her linguistic terms and how they’re applied in Na’vi, based on the Wikipedia and later Wikibooks articles, essentially translating what it said and improvising little drills on the way, like: ‘In this sentence, which word is in the accusative?’ (She’s a Russophone Ukrainian, which was somewhat helpful.) ‘How would you change the sentence to convey that you see the person you’re talking to, but you’re _not_ happy about it?’ ‘Name the noun cases and the suffixes that indicate them.’ I also taught her what ejective consonants are; while I was familiar with the concept, I originally misread the name as ‘ejaculative’ and told her not to laugh at-she didn’t even know the English word ‘ejaculate’, though. It took her a while to master, but she was so proud when she got it, hah. Meanwhile, the other girls who comprised the Na’vi group tried learning Na’vi on their own, but they focused more on vocabulary, using a website they were given by the organizers. As a result, they didn’t know the first thing about grammar or pronunciation-my friend told me she’d heard one girl pronouncing px as [f] instad of [p’], and she explained the mistake to her (‘once I was done laughing’). So they pretty much divided the work so that my friend was in charge of grammar and pronunciation and her group mates were in charge of vocabulary. Then they taught each other the material they’d studied. At one point my friend told me about a funny incident that had happened that day: the teacher in charge of their team once came up to them while they were studying with the transcripts of our sessions. He wanted to say something, then noticed the transcripts, picked them up, turned pale, gave them a thumbs up, and went to talk to another group. CONCLUSION Eventually they didn’t really need my lessons. They just had to translate a very short text in Na’vi, then call TAU and pronounce _Oe-l nga-ti kam-ei-e_ properly. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a Na’vi greeting featured prominently in the film, glossed as ‘I-ERG you-ACC see-LAUD’, i.e. ‘I see you and I’m happy about it’, but more like ‘I see the inner you’.) Furthermore, Na’vi grammar is pretty much made of a collection of the most esoteric grammatical features of human languages, and the language with the most similar grammar to Na’vi I know is Georgian (which also shares ejective consonants with it). Not only that, but they didn’t even pass the first stage. But at least I sparked her interest in linguistics, and now she can write in her CV, ‘Languages: Hebrew, English, Russian, Japanese [which she was taking at Berlitz], Na’vi...’, and I can write, ‘Also, I was once a Na’vi teacher…’ (I actually did have that in my CV for a while, until I realized it was pretty cringe.) And, of course, we both have an nice anecdote to share.
I've never seen a review of Na'vi, and this was pretty good! However, you actually made a mistake in both your description of transitive verbal arguments, and in your description of ergative-absolutive alignment. There are not "two agents" of a transitive verb, but rather an agent (the actor/doer) and a patient (the undergoer of an action). In "She saw them," "she" is the agent, and "them" is the patient. Intransitive verbs have one sole argument (often an experiencer, an agent, or a force). You got this mostly right, but when it comes to ergative-absolutive languages, it's the AGENT (actor/doer) of a transitive verb which is marked as ergative, while both the patient of the transitive verb and the sole argument of the intransitive verb that are marked as absolutive; you just said it backwards. You were right about everything else :) tenpo suno ni o pona tawa sina :D - jan Wasin
I have this concept that I’ve never fleshed out for an alien language. Fundamentally, each syllable is a chord. I haven’t worked on it since highschool, so maybe I’ll get back to it.
You got ergative and absolutive mixed up. The absolutive case includes transitive objects/patients and intransitive "subjects" and in most (but not all) ergative languages it is unmarked. The ergative case includes only transitive agents/subjects, and is marked in most (but not all) ergative languages. (At least one has to be marked, obviously.)
'which is preety uneuropean', I thought we were talking about a non-human language. He was really critical on Klingon for having features which exist in human language and this language is the same, it doesn't have any really weird non-human stuff that a human could still learn, it just has some stuff that's rare but still exists.
I'd say there's a few distinctions here: Klingon is going out of its way to try and sound alien and weird, but it really doesn't and isn't that hard to make the sounds of as a person (which makes sense, because Klingons have pretty human-like anatomy, and for good reason because actual humans do need to pronounce these words when making the shows) Na'vi is trying just enough to sound weird but isn't going really overboard or over the top. It's trying more to fit with the more human-like characters that is the Na'vi race. It makes sense. If their throat is structured a lot like a human's is, they'd probably make and use pretty similar sounds.
I also detected a hint of snobbery toward Klingon. I agree with Conlang Critic, that Klingon is overrated. I disagree that the Na'vi sound pallette is any better. Seems to me, it's because CC resents the small-minded anglo bias against hard sounds and againts xh. So when he sees Klingon, which was designed to cater to this anglo bias, he resents Klingon. Of course the rest of Klingon is fairly shallow, so I'd say his overall disdain is fair.
@@MrCantStopTheRobot The thing about the kingdom sound inventory is that it's unrealistic for an alien race as well. An alien language might have weird or unusual set combinations, but it makes no sense for them to seem like they just snatched random sounds out of a hat and threw them on a table. By contrast, the Na'vi inventory doesn't deviate from a human inventory in any way whatsoever. Sure electives are KINDA rare, but they aren't that rare, not enough to call them an "unusual/alien feature". However, this makes sense, considering the anatomy of the Na'vi is extremely similar to human anatomy, at least as far as we see it. While they don't actually mention it in their Klingon video, I would hope that this was the real reason he dislikes the inventory.
There are actually a few other types of case systems beside nom-acc, ergo-abs and tripartite. There are two types that require context to distinguish object and subject of a transitive verb, one that has no cases at all (and I mean also no case specification through word order or agreement affixes on verbs) and one with a transitive case and an intransitive case, though they are rare, especially the last one.
I hope you can find a conlang based on Austronesian Alignment. (Basically, the topic noun is marked and the verb conjugates to what the topic noun is, if it's the object, subject, location, etc.) I think this is similar to or is the Tripartite Alignment? It's very common in Austronesia, the Philippines, the Pacific Islands, etc.
Elijah Golpe I'm Filipino and speak fluent Tagalog (which features the austronesian alignment) but I can't wrap my head on how to conjugate verbs into their respective foci. It will be really cool though.
So, I looked up how tripartite and ergative-absolutive alignment work on wikipedia, and wanted to run this by whomever is reading. In a tripartite language like Nez Perce, Ainu or-in this case-Na'vi, the sentence "the man shot the elk", would be better translated as "the man does a shoot to the elk". In ergative-absolutive alignment, it would be, roughly, "elk-shoot does the man", where "elk" and "shoot" are different words, but are alike in being affected by the agent. Is this statement correct or incorrect?
Good question, but I'm not sure how well the distinction could be captured using English sentences of any kind. It's not something like SOV, where you can demonstrate SOV by saying something like "you the elk shoot". The alignment of a language has to do with how the language uses noun cases to encode for meaning. Noun cases are already difficult for English speakers to understand, since pronouns are the only words in English that inflect for noun case. You say "I shoot the elk" and not "Me shoot the elk" because you use "I" when you are the subject and "me" when you are the object. Whether you are "subject" or "object" will depend on what verb you use. A sentence such as "the elk compels me to shoot" carries similar meaning, however you used a different verb that implies something else is doing the action, so you are no longer the subject, so you use the word "me" and not "I". Similar rules can be said for any language that has a nominative-accusative alignment, but rules change for languages with different alignment. Ergative-absolutive languages use different noun cases depending on whether the verb is transitive. These noun cases don't represent the same things that "I" and "me" represent, so to avoid confusion, let's say "Ia" represents the 1st person ergative case and "Ib" represents the 1st person absolutive case. In an Ergative-absolutive language, you would say "Ib shoot" since you don't mention what is being shot, but if you do mention what's being shot, then you would either say "Ia shoot the elk" or "The elk compels Ib to shoot", depending on who is implied to do the action. In a tripartite language these would be rendered "Ib shoot", "Ia shoot the elk", and "The elk compels me to shoot" (where "me" is identical to its usage in English). These aren't the only possibilities, though. For instance, some Native American languages use different cases to indicate whether an action is done voluntarily. You might say "Ic shoot" if you planned to do so, and "Id shoot" if you accidentally fired early. These languages don't necessarily place distinction on who is subject or object, so you could also say "The elk compels Ic to shoot" or "The elk compels Id to shoot", again depending on whether the action was voluntary. "Semantic role" is the useful keyword to search if this is interesting. Think of it this way: for any language there are two maps: meaning ⟶ case, and case ⟶ inflection. "Meaning" in this context means things like whether the verb is transitive, whether the noun is subject or object, whether the noun is voluntarily doing the action, or whether the noun is undergoing a state change of some kind. "Case" is any noun case that you're probably already familiar with, like nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive, etc. The alignment of the language is the first map, and the declension of the language is the second map.
I remember watching the Avatar movie adaptation before I even knew the show was a thing and it was really weird. It ended on a cliffhanger and I was really sad about it until I learned it's a show.
Pedantic, but Japanese does not have a "topical case", the topic markers は and も are specifically not case markers. They attach to an already declined noun phrase: 猫には、東京からも; as an exception, the nominative が and accusative を case markers disappear in front of a topic marker.
Glottal stop. It's the catch in your throat English speakers make in the middle of "Uh-oh". This same spelling convention for the glottal stop being an apostrophe is pretty common, most notably Hawaiian
@@BetaDude40 Well, technically Hawai'ian uses the ʻokina, en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CA%BBokina#Hawaiian and it looks more like a single opening quote, but an apostrophe will do in a pinch.
Wait, you say that Erg-Abs languages treat the agent of an intransitive sentence as an object, but then you say it puts subjects as absolutive and objects as ergative. But, those two statements can't both be true, because agents of intransitive sentences are absolutive, not ergative. If the agent is treated like an object, according your definition, then it should be ergative, according to your definition. But it isn't.
English pronouns don't actually change with the accusative case, they change with the oblique case. They're similar and there's a lot of overlap between them, but as a fluent Esperanto speaker I can tell you that with certainty.
oops, guess I got that mixed up I'm not a "real linguist", so I make these sorts of mistakes all the time (p sure Romanization is a type of orthography though)
Eh, not exactly. The orthography of a language is just however it is natively written. For example: the Arabic abjad is an orthography, the Latin alphabet is an orthography, the Devanagari, an abugida, is an orthography, and the Japanese syllabaries are orthographies. Those are native writing systems. A Romanization is a system by which one formally renders a different native orthography into the Latin alphabet. That is, using the Latin alphabet to make sense of different characters. I know that there's also Cyrillization, which attempts to formally render different native orthographies into the Cyrillic alphabet. Romanization and Cyrillization are two methods of transliteration.
Na'vi (the real life version, not the in universe version) was originally written with the Latin Alphabet, which sorta makes it the native writing system.
Yes, well, I wasn't arguing that. Your comment to Danika Inq adds the statement "p sure Romanization is a type of orthography though." I was simply pointing out that they are not the same thing, and that the Latin alphabet is an orthography, but Romanization is a system by which one formally transliterates any different orthography into the Latin alphabet. In this video, you did use "orthography" correctly, but I was just adding a comment about your parenthetical statement.
Honestly it would have made more sense to translate "Jake Sully" as something like cjekxsuli, even though it wouldn't make the joke as obvious. On a different note, what's wrong with your audio?
Wait... What do you mean that The Last Airbender never got a film adaption? I totally rememb -- *The author of this comment suddenly perished before it was completed.
It was a derivative movie that wasn’t very good. That’s why it has left less of an impact on popular culture than good films that had something to say.
Another feature of the Na'vi language worth mentioning: Its number system is octal rather than decimal. Because the Na'vi have four-fingered hands.
YES!!! I LOVE OCTAL!!!
that’s some big brain stuff
Looks like computer science will come natural to them
@@matthewe3813 I mean... it _kinda_ already _does..._
@@NStriplesevenindeed
*Never got a film adaptation*
Thank you for your service
There is no movie in Ba Sing Se
He should have specified that the movie should be good.
you are literalh wrong
source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Airbender_(2010_film)
@@MeowNap you are probably some 18 year old military idiot named nathaniel like a loser!!!!!!
@@MeowNap dude
it's a joke
Actually, Jakesully became _Na'vi slang_ for moron.
The formal word for moron is _skxawng._
"A show that never got a feature film release" I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE. AND I LIKE IT!
There is no Last Airbender film in the walls of Ba Sing Se.
I don't understand
There was an avatar the last airbender movie and it sucked so they are jokingly saying it doesn’t exist
@@PokemonFan-yy8is IT DID NOT EXIST. DO NOT SPEAK SUCH BLASPHEMY.
Ironically, this is something no one has ever said about an M. Night Shaymalan film...
we need somebody to edit you so it sounds like your beat boxing with all of those sound pronounciations
The ejectives in Na'vi are actually exactly the sounds most commonly used in beatboxing.
OwO
you're*
@@rachelzimet8310 Caucasian speakers be ხeatხბxiიყ
@@ijemand5672 i thought you were just being an apostrophe asshole but now i realize it and i agree with you
Of course you like Na'vi less than the language with the facepalm and hats as phonemes XD
i think he meant “but not as much as i don’t like kay(f)bop(t)”
Kay(f)bop(t) succeeds amazingly at what it was designed for, being a collection of several linguistic jokes and overall parody of conlangs. I assume it succeeds at this more than Na'vi succeeds as a naturalistic artlang according to Misali, so it was ranked higher. I don't think he 'likes' Na'vi less or Kay(f)bop(t) more.
@@thesunwillneverset jan Misali : *literally says "like"*
You : I'm going to ignore that
@@Mercure250 I'll admit I did misspeak there, what I meant was more justifying the 'like' as he says that generically for every ranking.
@@thesunwillneverset Right, but then, I'm not sure what the purpose of your response is
As a 10+ year Na'vi speaker, I can confidently say that your prediction at the start of the video was basically the only part you got wrong!
Excellent job covering Na'vi here, you picked out a lot of the really interesting details about the language to highlight. As others have said, I would've liked to have seen the Octal system mentioned. And while you did mention syllabic consonants ("rr" and "ll") it would've been nice to see them directly. One other piece that is (perhaps a bit less) interesting is there is a vocative particle for addressing someone. "Ma" - Neytiri says this a few times in the film.
The only thing I would actually correct is the whole "jakesully = moron" thing, which is a tongue in cheek addition that isn't to be taken seriously.
The *actual* word for moron is "Skxawng" (which Jake says in the movie, albeit more like "skawn" in his intentionally bad pronunciation)
All in all, txantsan! (Awesome!)
Why do you speak Na'vi?
@@iamasalad9080why not?
Always find languages with a culture behind it interesting tbh more than ones that lack it
In the movie, Jake said the word for "idiot" is something completely different.
You're thinking of 'skxawng', which means moron. If 'jakesully' is a synonym to 'skxawng', at least in Omatikaya, I imagine this is because Jake was a moron in their eyes.
@@PwnEveryBody Seems like it would probably mean "idiot but with a connotation of affection and/or likely to cause damage to friend and foe alike; 'the right man in the wrong place.'"
@Haley Fucking Halcyon - Gaming Channel Maybe cyeksoli?
Maybe jakesully is slang?
Skauwn, they say
when you got into the ejective part of the sound inventory i felt that sick beat coming out
What is all of this fluff about M. Night. Shamallama making a "Last Airbender" movie?
It's just a myth, guys. It was a joke--there was no movie.
I've seen with my own eyes... That was the last thing they agreed to see...
@@elkandevening We must be cleansed
There is no movie in Ba-Sing-Se
@@sethmcabee3076 M. Night. Shaymalan has invited you to Lake Laogai.
When I was in high school I was briefly a Na’vi tutor. Yes really.
BACKGROUND
_About the Golden Mouse competition_
There is (or was?) this sort of contest called ‘The Golden Mouse’ (a.k.a. ‘The Virtual Olympics’), an annual competition for geeks held by the Tel-Aviv University and Mif‘àl haPáyis (basically the national lottery).
The way the competition works is that 50-odd schools that have a building paid for by MhP gather middle school students (20-odd in total, rough assessment) who are given subjects they have to study, like math and history and some more niche subjects, under the direction of one of the teachers at the school. The students normally divide into sub-groups, each dedicated for one topic or more. After some time spent studying, they are gathered to answer those questions online within a set timeframe.
After this, the 50-odd teams get whittled down to 30-odd, and the process is repeated.
Those 30-odd teams are in turn whittled down to 5, which are taken (on a school day!) to TAU to hear three lectures. Then they are sent to separate rooms, where they answer questions related to those lectures.
Finally, there’s a big ceremony and the top three places are announced.
Now, the second stage (or sometimes the first) usually requires basic knowledge of a given languge: one time it was Old High German, another time it was Esperanto, another year it was Italian, and that’s as far as my knowledge goes.
_My personal connection_
When I was 18, a loose friend of mine randomly asked me if I was familiar with the competition, and if I was willing to help her because she had to study a language for it and she knew I was a language geek. What she didn’t know was that I had competed in the competition myself twice: when I was in the eighth grade, and again the following year. The first time I was there, the language was Mandarin; six kids wanted to learn it, but they all gave up pretty quickly, and I was the only one who stuck with it. Nowadays I speak a bit of Mandarin, but I’m not remotely fluent or anything. That year we also won the competition. (The next year there was no language, and we didn’t win, but we did get to the finals.)
Naturally, I was overcome with sweet nostalgia and said yes. When she told me she needed my help with learning Na’vi, I was even happier, even though I didn’t know the first thing about the language.
THE PROCESS
The first thing I did was tell my friend to learn to read IPA while I read about the language on Wikipedia. Then we started making little sessions on MSN Messenger, in which I taught her linguistic terms and how they’re applied in Na’vi, based on the Wikipedia and later Wikibooks articles, essentially translating what it said and improvising little drills on the way, like:
‘In this sentence, which word is in the accusative?’ (She’s a Russophone Ukrainian, which was somewhat helpful.)
‘How would you change the sentence to convey that you see the person you’re talking to, but you’re _not_ happy about it?’
‘Name the noun cases and the suffixes that indicate them.’
I also taught her what ejective consonants are; while I was familiar with the concept, I originally misread the name as ‘ejaculative’ and told her not to laugh at-she didn’t even know the English word ‘ejaculate’, though. It took her a while to master, but she was so proud when she got it, hah.
Meanwhile, the other girls who comprised the Na’vi group tried learning Na’vi on their own, but they focused more on vocabulary, using a website they were given by the organizers. As a result, they didn’t know the first thing about grammar or pronunciation-my friend told me she’d heard one girl pronouncing px as [f] instad of [p’], and she explained the mistake to her (‘once I was done laughing’). So they pretty much divided the work so that my friend was in charge of grammar and pronunciation and her group mates were in charge of vocabulary. Then they taught each other the material they’d studied.
At one point my friend told me about a funny incident that had happened that day: the teacher in charge of their team once came up to them while they were studying with the transcripts of our sessions. He wanted to say something, then noticed the transcripts, picked them up, turned pale, gave them a thumbs up, and went to talk to another group.
CONCLUSION
Eventually they didn’t really need my lessons. They just had to translate a very short text in Na’vi, then call TAU and pronounce _Oe-l nga-ti kam-ei-e_ properly. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a Na’vi greeting featured prominently in the film, glossed as ‘I-ERG you-ACC see-LAUD’, i.e. ‘I see you and I’m happy about it’, but more like ‘I see the inner you’.) Furthermore, Na’vi grammar is pretty much made of a collection of the most esoteric grammatical features of human languages, and the language with the most similar grammar to Na’vi I know is Georgian (which also shares ejective consonants with it). Not only that, but they didn’t even pass the first stage.
But at least I sparked her interest in linguistics, and now she can write in her CV, ‘Languages: Hebrew, English, Russian, Japanese [which she was taking at Berlitz], Na’vi...’, and I can write, ‘Also, I was once a Na’vi teacher…’ (I actually did have that in my CV for a while, until I realized it was pretty cringe.)
And, of course, we both have an nice anecdote to share.
You're amazing!
Very great story!
TMI, bro. No one cares.
…replied @@TheZetaKai to a comment with 71 likes and two enthusiastic replies preceding his own
You replied, LOL.
Shout-out to Moist Spaghetto
I've never seen a review of Na'vi, and this was pretty good! However, you actually made a mistake in both your description of transitive verbal arguments, and in your description of ergative-absolutive alignment. There are not "two agents" of a transitive verb, but rather an agent (the actor/doer) and a patient (the undergoer of an action). In "She saw them," "she" is the agent, and "them" is the patient. Intransitive verbs have one sole argument (often an experiencer, an agent, or a force). You got this mostly right, but when it comes to ergative-absolutive languages, it's the AGENT (actor/doer) of a transitive verb which is marked as ergative, while both the patient of the transitive verb and the sole argument of the intransitive verb that are marked as absolutive; you just said it backwards. You were right about everything else :)
tenpo suno ni o pona tawa sina :D
- jan Wasin
Could the videos be a little bit longer?
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
i wish for 5 miniute videos that would also include more examplary sentences
3 years later here comes a 40-minute video
@@zionj104 and i couldn't be happier
I liked the newest one thats almost 40 minutes so I do agree
You uploaded this literally the same day I found out about this!! Keep going
Consonant beatbox!
At the end of every video he makes this sound that sounds like "This series is gonna kill me one day..."
Every time he reads the phonemes it sounds like he's about to start beatboxing
Yeah, I'm SURE that NOBODY has EVER made this comment
I have this concept that I’ve never fleshed out for an alien language. Fundamentally, each syllable is a chord. I haven’t worked on it since highschool, so maybe I’ll get back to it.
You got ergative and absolutive mixed up. The absolutive case includes transitive objects/patients and intransitive "subjects" and in most (but not all) ergative languages it is unmarked. The ergative case includes only transitive agents/subjects, and is marked in most (but not all) ergative languages. (At least one has to be marked, obviously.)
'which is preety uneuropean', I thought we were talking about a non-human language. He was really critical on Klingon for having features which exist in human language and this language is the same, it doesn't have any really weird non-human stuff that a human could still learn, it just has some stuff that's rare but still exists.
I'd say there's a few distinctions here:
Klingon is going out of its way to try and sound alien and weird, but it really doesn't and isn't that hard to make the sounds of as a person (which makes sense, because Klingons have pretty human-like anatomy, and for good reason because actual humans do need to pronounce these words when making the shows)
Na'vi is trying just enough to sound weird but isn't going really overboard or over the top. It's trying more to fit with the more human-like characters that is the Na'vi race. It makes sense. If their throat is structured a lot like a human's is, they'd probably make and use pretty similar sounds.
I also detected a hint of snobbery toward Klingon. I agree with Conlang Critic, that Klingon is overrated. I disagree that the Na'vi sound pallette is any better. Seems to me, it's because CC resents the small-minded anglo bias against hard sounds and againts xh. So when he sees Klingon, which was designed to cater to this anglo bias, he resents Klingon. Of course the rest of Klingon is fairly shallow, so I'd say his overall disdain is fair.
@@MrCantStopTheRobot The thing about the kingdom sound inventory is that it's unrealistic for an alien race as well. An alien language might have weird or unusual set combinations, but it makes no sense for them to seem like they just snatched random sounds out of a hat and threw them on a table. By contrast, the Na'vi inventory doesn't deviate from a human inventory in any way whatsoever. Sure electives are KINDA rare, but they aren't that rare, not enough to call them an "unusual/alien feature". However, this makes sense, considering the anatomy of the Na'vi is extremely similar to human anatomy, at least as far as we see it. While they don't actually mention it in their Klingon video, I would hope that this was the real reason he dislikes the inventory.
Jakesully sounds more like a slang term for the language than a part of the core vocabulary.
0:24 it's funny bcs i have to use a qualifier for the _cartoon_ when i say "avatar", at least when i talk to older people
please make more of these... they make my day when I see them
To answer your question, jakesully is the name of the main character
And he is not only a moron, but a traitor, but on a different scale, than most people.
weird how half of everyone who watched this episode didn't get the joke about the word for moron
their sounds sound like buzzing it feels very natural and beautiful
Objects and patients are in the absolutive case and agents and transitive subjects in the ergative case. You got it backwards at just before 2:49
WHEN HE UPLOADS A QUONLANG CRITIQUE
0:51-0:55 is _fire_
There are actually a few other types of case systems beside nom-acc, ergo-abs and tripartite. There are two types that require context to distinguish object and subject of a transitive verb, one that has no cases at all (and I mean also no case specification through word order or agreement affixes on verbs) and one with a transitive case and an intransitive case, though they are rare, especially the last one.
Doesn't the last one, like not exist in any natural languages and is purely theoretical? Correct me if I'm wrong
What happened to the audio quality? It sounds muffled now.
"A duck is to deal you moist spaghetto"
Nice
"Which tragically never got a film adaptation." Right. That's correct.
0:53 Bro really went beatbox mode.
I hope you can find a conlang based on Austronesian Alignment. (Basically, the topic noun is marked and the verb conjugates to what the topic noun is, if it's the object, subject, location, etc.) I think this is similar to or is the Tripartite Alignment? It's very common in Austronesia, the Philippines, the Pacific Islands, etc.
Elijah Golpe I'm Filipino and speak fluent Tagalog (which features the austronesian alignment) but I can't wrap my head on how to conjugate verbs into their respective foci. It will be really cool though.
“Never got a film adaptation”
h m m m
there is no movie in ba sing se
"which tragically never got a movie" -jan misali
How to design an alien? Let's take a human and paint it blue!
Seems legit
So, I looked up how tripartite and ergative-absolutive alignment work on wikipedia, and wanted to run this by whomever is reading. In a tripartite language like Nez Perce, Ainu or-in this case-Na'vi, the sentence "the man shot the elk", would be better translated as "the man does a shoot to the elk". In ergative-absolutive alignment, it would be, roughly, "elk-shoot does the man", where "elk" and "shoot" are different words, but are alike in being affected by the agent. Is this statement correct or incorrect?
Good question, but I'm not sure how well the distinction could be captured using English sentences of any kind. It's not something like SOV, where you can demonstrate SOV by saying something like "you the elk shoot". The alignment of a language has to do with how the language uses noun cases to encode for meaning. Noun cases are already difficult for English speakers to understand, since pronouns are the only words in English that inflect for noun case. You say "I shoot the elk" and not "Me shoot the elk" because you use "I" when you are the subject and "me" when you are the object. Whether you are "subject" or "object" will depend on what verb you use. A sentence such as "the elk compels me to shoot" carries similar meaning, however you used a different verb that implies something else is doing the action, so you are no longer the subject, so you use the word "me" and not "I". Similar rules can be said for any language that has a nominative-accusative alignment, but rules change for languages with different alignment. Ergative-absolutive languages use different noun cases depending on whether the verb is transitive. These noun cases don't represent the same things that "I" and "me" represent, so to avoid confusion, let's say "Ia" represents the 1st person ergative case and "Ib" represents the 1st person absolutive case. In an Ergative-absolutive language, you would say "Ib shoot" since you don't mention what is being shot, but if you do mention what's being shot, then you would either say "Ia shoot the elk" or "The elk compels Ib to shoot", depending on who is implied to do the action. In a tripartite language these would be rendered "Ib shoot", "Ia shoot the elk", and "The elk compels me to shoot" (where "me" is identical to its usage in English).
These aren't the only possibilities, though. For instance, some Native American languages use different cases to indicate whether an action is done voluntarily. You might say "Ic shoot" if you planned to do so, and "Id shoot" if you accidentally fired early. These languages don't necessarily place distinction on who is subject or object, so you could also say "The elk compels Ic to shoot" or "The elk compels Id to shoot", again depending on whether the action was voluntary. "Semantic role" is the useful keyword to search if this is interesting.
Think of it this way: for any language there are two maps: meaning ⟶ case, and case ⟶ inflection. "Meaning" in this context means things like whether the verb is transitive, whether the noun is subject or object, whether the noun is voluntarily doing the action, or whether the noun is undergoing a state change of some kind. "Case" is any noun case that you're probably already familiar with, like nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive, etc. The alignment of the language is the first map, and the declension of the language is the second map.
Wouldn't the genitive of "I" be "mine" instead of "my"?
Did you use your microphone as a flail?
Jan Misali: the -'s suffix me: HELLO THAT'S CALLED A CLITIC
I remember watching the Avatar movie adaptation before I even knew the show was a thing and it was really weird. It ended on a cliffhanger and I was really sad about it until I learned it's a show.
there is no movie within the walls of ba sing se
Is there a show about the blue people?
Pedantic, but Japanese does not have a "topical case", the topic markers は and も are specifically not case markers. They attach to an already declined noun phrase: 猫には、東京からも; as an exception, the nominative が and accusative を case markers disappear in front of a topic marker.
0:53
"starts beatboxing"
What's the apostrophe for then? What is it marking?
Glottal stop. It's the catch in your throat English speakers make in the middle of "Uh-oh". This same spelling convention for the glottal stop being an apostrophe is pretty common, most notably Hawaiian
@@BetaDude40 Well, technically Hawai'ian uses the ʻokina, en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CA%BBokina#Hawaiian and it looks more like a single opening quote, but an apostrophe will do in a pinch.
Some random person: Wait, but ATLA does have a movie adapta-
Every single ATLA fan in existence: *shhhhh,* no it doesn't.
How about doing Verbis Diablo from Penny Dreadful?
just updated the Big List.
Fantastic. Beautiful.
how did you make that sound at 1:13
Hows about criticizing Hymnos from the Ar Tonelico game series? It bases itself off a specific emotion system and there's tons of songs in it.
just updated the Big List.
ps. oh hey it's astrodonut! I remember watching your videos when I was first learning Toki Pona!
a, toki! :D lipu suli li lon seme?
lipi suli li lon poki nanpa mi taso. ona li "SECRET SHH" lon toki Inli.
a, poki nanpa sina li seme? >.< mi sona ala. ike mi!
"poki nanpa" = "number box" ;)
moist spaghetto is a great name
What happened to your voice in this episode?
what happened to your mic?
The avatar movie with blue people chose the wrong name
Have you ever reviewed Atlantean?
Na'vi seems to be based off Georgian (ejectives and vowels), minus words like "gvprckvni".
0:30 Yeah, M. Night Shyamalan never touched this.
Why for the love of God are the ejectives written like that
Is his name Feliz :/->navidad
Great video!
I want to learn it!!
Couldn't you have chosen a better noun than "example" as an....oh fuck me.
I was bracing myself for some smack talk XD
Nattvi is how I would spell it. I thin k that dd for the flap would be better for english speakers too.
0:51 nice beatboxing.
It's it just me or does his mic suddenly sound a lot worse
3:36 Jake Sully is THE main character we follow in the film.
He was such a moron that he became a word.
Sadly, Avatar the show did get a feature film. I would like to go back 5 years and stop them but no.
Wait, you say that Erg-Abs languages treat the agent of an intransitive sentence as an object, but then you say it puts subjects as absolutive and objects as ergative. But, those two statements can't both be true, because agents of intransitive sentences are absolutive, not ergative. If the agent is treated like an object, according your definition, then it should be ergative, according to your definition. But it isn't.
Audio is terrible, but I like this video.
0:51 WHERJA LEARN HOW TO BEATBOX
discord invite expired :(
Phonology more like beatboxing
Tragically never got a film adaptation🤣😂🤣
Who else is here after Chapo's Avatar revitalisation campaign?
Great review! I'd love to see an episode about Sambahsa.
just updated the Big List.
na'vi is my favourite conlang after sindarin
the word for moron is actually skxaung but yeah
skxawng
@@WhizzKid2012 shit, I guess I’m the skxawng now
Moist
I believe Avatar (the airbender one) *did* get a film adaptation. It was just terrible...
there is no ATLA film adaptation in ba sing se
English pronouns don't actually change with the accusative case, they change with the oblique case. They're similar and there's a lot of overlap between them, but as a fluent Esperanto speaker I can tell you that with certainty.
I would recommend a better mic.
Could you please stop calling romanization "orthography" and arguments "agents"?
oops, guess I got that mixed up
I'm not a "real linguist", so I make these sorts of mistakes all the time
(p sure Romanization is a type of orthography though)
Eh, not exactly. The orthography of a language is just however it is natively written. For example: the Arabic abjad is an orthography, the Latin alphabet is an orthography, the Devanagari, an abugida, is an orthography, and the Japanese syllabaries are orthographies. Those are native writing systems.
A Romanization is a system by which one formally renders a different native orthography into the Latin alphabet. That is, using the Latin alphabet to make sense of different characters. I know that there's also Cyrillization, which attempts to formally render different native orthographies into the Cyrillic alphabet. Romanization and Cyrillization are two methods of transliteration.
Na'vi (the real life version, not the in universe version) was originally written with the Latin Alphabet, which sorta makes it the native writing system.
Yes, well, I wasn't arguing that. Your comment to Danika Inq adds the statement "p sure Romanization is a type of orthography though." I was simply pointing out that they are not the same thing, and that the Latin alphabet is an orthography, but Romanization is a system by which one formally transliterates any different orthography into the Latin alphabet. In this video, you did use "orthography" correctly, but I was just adding a comment about your parenthetical statement.
Imma learn na’vi I loved the movie and the language sounds really cool
Did you do it? Or were you full of BS just trying to impress strangers on the internet?
JC Avatar was good, the 3d was an absolute disappointment (an advert with hazelnuts in it shown beforehand had better 3d)
Honestly it would have made more sense to translate "Jake Sully" as something like cjekxsuli, even though it wouldn't make the joke as obvious.
On a different note, what's wrong with your audio?
my old mic stopped working
*MoIsT sPaGhEtTo*
Wait... What do you mean that The Last Airbender never got a film adaption? I totally rememb --
*The author of this comment suddenly perished before it was completed.
It was a derivative movie that wasn’t very good. That’s why it has left less of an impact on popular culture than good films that had something to say.
Nice beats
0:51
Mmmmmm.... Moist Spaghetto
3:20
"The series "Avatar" that never got a film adaptation
You mean a goos film adaptation
there is no movie in ba sing se
Slovian for Na'vi
Consonants:
M N NN P PP T TT K KK '
C W Z F S H Þ L J R
Vowels:Y YY U E O A AA
Unused(B D DZ G NJ Æ)
fliudlang
Navi consonants are spelled with Greek letters:m n p t k r l s z f θ x v ð ɣ
*SUCC* essful