Some of you may know the film Atlantis: The Lost Empire. If you were really interested, you could have read something about the Atlantean language, a speakable and interesting conlang made by none other than the famous creator of Klingon and Na'vi, Mark Okrand. It was designed to be the plausible ancestor to all the languages on Earth, and therefore the vocabulary has been taken from very many phyla. However, the base of the roots lies in Proto-Indo-European. Okrand also apparently spliced roots from these phyla, coming up with words like "tab", father, which combined Hebrew "ab" and Irish "tad".

In general, Atlantean is a calm, realistic language with the syntax of Japanese, the morphology of Sumerian, and vocabulary from practically everywhere. I think Okrand did an excellent job with it. Unfortunately, he has not published any books or dictionaries on the Atlantean language, so much of the language (mainly the Shepherd's Journal) must be deciphered step by painful step. Okrand is more likely than not sitting on a wordlist that Disney told him not to publish in anticipation of a sequel to Atlantis: The Lost Empire, but those who saw the second movie know how "successful" it was. Unfortunately, Okrand has stayed silent despite numerous letters and emails, so the fan base for Atlantean can only hope for a miracle. Some fans including myself have introduced neologisms, but that is obviously not very credible and is only suitable for fan use.

In this thread I aim to introduce the grammar of the language, which is not very difficult and is very regular, making Atlantean a language that is very easy to become proficient in.

Sounds and Phonology

Stress
Stress always falls on the first syllable.

Vowels
Atlantean has a common five vowel system which is common to many languages on the planet. The five basic vowels, when stressed, are [aeiou] with their corresponding IPA values. Optionally, they can be lax when unstressed, making [aeiou] [əɛɪɔʊ] respectively. In the same allophones trend, monosyllabic words tend to be lax even though the stress falls on their only vowel. There are three diphthongs, [aj ej oj]. The [oj] is used the least.

Consonants
The consonants of Atlantean are as such: [kgtdpblrnmywsʃjx]. When two appear in a row, the sound is optionally geminated.

Mark Okrand didn't create Na'vi. Paul Frommer did.

Oops. That's embarrassing. I shall retreat into my little shame-hole after editing my first post.

Edit:

It would help if I could. Gah.

Mmh... I take it you're not going to continue you explanation of the language? That would have been interesting

Tad is Welsh, not Irish. The Irish word for "father" is athair (< PIE *pH₂tér).

Reposted without comment from a PM sent at 14:11 today.

Belittle? He told him what was wrong, what the correct language was, and threw in some relevant information.

(I also think he's probably one of the oldest members on this forum.)

Very clever, one tries to avoid flames in the threads but you have to show to everybody how the new guy treats you to feed your oversized ego. If you are really the oldest here, that may explain a few things, like your pedantic smart senescent ass. Gaw, that sucks. If you are the typical member here, I might as well leave. Have a party now!

Rather to demonstrate to you that you can't get away with using PMs to make personal attacks that you're too cowardly to make in public. The goal isn't to keep flames secret, it's to keep them out of the forum altogether.


Patience, young man, you'll get there some day!


As you can see, the typical member here has as little patience for your lack of netiquette as I do, so this decision is probably for the best. Chiudi la porta quando te ne vai!