A Long, Long Time Ago...

[Savonarola]

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1800379216/info

I shall celebrate this historic milestone by choking some Gungans with the help of midi-chlorians.   

Did anyone here see the midnight release of the film?

[The Brain]

I particularly enjoyed the Jud Süss reference. Felt fresh.

[Savonarola]

I particularly enjoyed the Jud Süss reference. Felt fresh.

That was nice, but I personally preferred the Mask of Fu Manchu reference found in the scenes with the evir Asian ariens.

[Syt]

It was the first pirated movie I watched, when a friend showed up with a video tape ( ) of the movie less than a month after U.S. release (was scheduled for August or September in Germany).

It was after that experience that studios strived to put out major releases (near) simultaneously over here and in the U.S., not with 3 or 4 months delay as planned in this case and as was the norm before then.

[Syt]

Btw, my first thought at reading the topic title was the Al Yankovic song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl4fazc-hU0

[lustindarkness]

Heretic! the true birthday of Star Wars was 25th May 1977! 


And yes, I went to all the midnight shows.   

[Valmy]

The day the Star Wars died

[The Brain]

The day the Star Wars died

[derspiess]

Went to see it a week or so after it was released.  My expectations were so low after seeing the previews + spotting a Jar Jar poster at Walmart, that it slightly exceeded my expectations.  It was still a disservice to the original trilogy, of course.

I was on vacation, visiting some friends in West Virginia, so we went to a matinee to watch it.  Being crammed in a theater with a bunch of rednecks & their kids made it... interesting.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I did go to the midnight show of all three.  Three midnight shows, three cruddy mornings, three big disappointments.

[Savonarola]

I did go to the midnight show of all three.  Three midnight shows, three cruddy mornings, three big disappointments.

Why do you hate yourself so much?   

[jimmy olsen]

I did go to the midnight show of all three.  Three midnight shows, three cruddy mornings, three big disappointments.

I thought Revenge of the Sith was pretty good.

[Savonarola]

http://www.brycemoore.com/academic/linguistics/jarjar.html

Mesa Jar Jar Binks:
A Linguistic Look at the Gungan Language
Introduction
Who knew linguistics could be so much fun? This is the paper I wrote for English 323, the class that made me decide to add linguistics as a second major during my undergraduate years. The topic is perhaps a little out of the pop-culture limelight by now, but if you'll all recall, at the time there was quite the uproar over Jar Har and his ridiculous lines. Doing a simple linguistic analysis, I found there was a good reason for that furor: his dialectic is about as stupid as he is. Read on and find out why.

Paper
In the recent movie "Star Wars Episode One," the character of Jar Jar Binks created much controversy and discussion. People either hated or loved him. One of the main reasons for this love/hate attitude is the peculiar Gungan dialect that Jar Jar speaks. Most people overlooked the fact that the Gungan dialect offers many examples of simple linguistic fundamentals such as phonological rules, word formations, and speech acts. A careful look at Jar Jar's lines brings these points to light.

To begin it must be noted that the actor's representation of Jar Jar's speech often differs from Jar Jar's lines in the original script. For example, in Jar Jar's opening scene in the movie, he says "Oh boot it is! Tis demunded byda guds it is." In the script, the lines goes as follows: "Oh boot tis! Tis demunded byda guds. Tis a live debett, tis" (16). Jar Jar's dialect does not use the word "it" in the screenplay without shortening it or joining it to another word, but this example shows that the actor does not follow this rule in the movie. For purposes of regularity, the screenplay will be used as the authoritative source for the Gungan dialect.

Jar Jar often changes his speech in accordance with various phonological rules. First of all, progressive assimilation affects his speech. One good example of this is his tendency to change words ending in /Iŋ/ to instead end in /In/. "Nosir, nosir. Mesa hate crunchen. Dat's da last ting mesa wanten" (50) /I/ is a high front lax unrounded vowel. Because /I/ is pronounced at the front of the mouth, /ŋ/, a velar nasal pronounced near the back of the mouth is assimilated and changed to /n/, an alveolar nasal that is pronounced at the front, as well. Segment deletion, the deletion of a sound, also plays a part. "Da speedest way tooda Naboo is goen through da core" (20). Here /spidiεst/ changes to /spidεst/, with the extra /i/ deleted completely from the word.

The Gungan dialect contains many examples of word formations. Compounding, the process by which two words are joined in order to form a new word, is very prevalent. "Maxibig" (22) refers to something very large and the "Nocomebackie law" (21) is just what it sounds like--a rule of banishment. Zero Derivation, using the same form of a word to mean different things, also functions as a word formation process in Jar Jar's dialect. "Bombad" can mean both "good" (30), "bad" (114), and even is a title in the Gungan army--"Bombad General" (115). Outright coinage is present too. Such words as "bongo" (20), the word for a submarine; "Fambaa" (118), the word for the huge lizards that Gungans; and even "Gungan" itself are all coined words.

Jar Jar gives audiences examples of speech acts, both direct and indirect. "Mesa wonder why da guds invent pain," (104) illustrates the concept of a performative verb. Just by declaring that he wonders, Jar Jar accomplishes that action. This is an example of a direct speech act, an act where the form has a direct relation to the function the sentence plays. By saying "ahh... any hep here would be hot," (21) Jar Jar uses an indirect speech act. This sentence functions as a request for help, even though no question is actually asked. Its form does not relate directly to its function.

Jar Jar's dialect itself offers an intriguing view into the inner workings of language. One of the dominant aspects of the Gungan dialect is its treatment of pronouns. We, I, and you are pronounced "wesa," "mesa," and "yousa," while he and us are pronounced "hisens" and "uss-en." Helping verbs such as "be" and "do" are usually replaced by these altered pronouns, as well. "Mesa Ja Ja Binkss" means "I am Jar Jar Binks," and "Wesa no like the Naboo" means "We do not like the Naboo." Ideally, rules such as these form the basis for a normal dialect.

However, Jar Jar's dialect is not consistent. In the 33 times Jar Jar uses a word that means "I," 24 times he uses "mesa," but he uses "my" five times and leaves it as "I" four times. There is seemingly no pattern that he follows to determine his pronoun choice. "Me" is replaced with "my," "mesa," or just left "me." His pronunciation is also haphazard. Sometimes /θ/ and /δ/ are replaced with /t/ and /d/ respectively such as in "tink" for "think" and "da" for "the." However, Jar Jar says "without" and "them" normally. Jar Jar's accent follows no rhyme or reason. For example, /i/ is pronounced as /e/ in some words (such as "spake" for "speak" (15) and "hair" for "here" (20)), but is unchanged in the prevalent "mesa" and "wesa" words. "The" is sometimes pronounced "der" (17) instead of the usual "da."

All of these contradictions were written into the script. The actor then went on to alter many of the lines as he saw fit. The result is a dialect that often fails to follow the rules it is based on. At times, it seems to have no discernible rules at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Jar Jar's character was both so disliked and so hard to understand by viewers. A naturally formed dialect follows consistent rules, even though those rules are often at odds with the standard dialect. Once these rules are understood, the listener can then clearly understand what the speaker is saying. If this pattern is not followed, confusion is the result. When creating Jar Jar's lines, more care should have been taken to ensure that his dialect remained true to itself, but his dialect still serves to exemplify linguistic principles.

Bibliography
Lucas, George. Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace Illustrated Screenplay. New York, NY: Del Rey, 1999.

I hope he got an A for that.   

[jimmy olsen]

Klingon > Gungan

http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/

There's No Klingon Word for HelloA history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and the people who speak it.

By Arika OkrentPosted Thursday, May 7, 2009, at 11:54 AM ET

There's something missing from J.J. Abrams' reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, and that something is Klingon. I mean Klingon the language. If that sounds like a minor omission, consider this: The very first lines of the first Star Trek movie in 1979 were in Klingon: wIy cha'! HaSta! cha yIghuS! And those few words—which were subtitled as "Tactical ... Visual ... Tactical, stand by on torpedoes!"—have since blossomed into, if not a full-fledged language, one at least fledged enough to have a dictionary, a translation of Hamlet, and a small but dedicated community of (nonfictional) speakers, who'll feel miffed by Abrams' oversight.

Let's just skip over the customary jokes about 40-year-old virgins who still live in their parents' basements. Klingon speakers have heard them all. But the insults don't bother them, because they know something you don't. They know that Klingon is a sophisticated, extremely complex language that very few can master. I first came to Klingon as a linguist doing research for a book on artificial languages. My intention was to observe from a nice, distant, scientific perspective, but somehow I ended up with a little bronze pin indicating that I'd passed the first-level certification exam. The grammar offered an irresistible linguistic challenge. Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable. Anyone can put on a pair of pointed ears or memorize some lines of dialogue, but learning to speak Klingon requires genuine hard work.

Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. This is not surprising, considering that Klingon was created by Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language.

Okrand was originally hired by the producer of Star Trek II to write dialogue in Vulcan for a scene, between Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley, that had been filmed in English. His task was to create lines that could be dubbed over the actors' mouth movements in a believable way. Two years later, when the production team of Star Trek III wanted some scenes in Klingon, they called on Okrand again. This time he was not constrained by pre-existing mouth movements—the actors would be filmed speaking Klingon—but there were two other conditions that he had to take into account. The first was the existence of those few words of Klingon spoken in the first Star Trek movie (written by James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty). Second, he knew the language was supposed to be tough-sounding, befitting a warrior race. Klingons are rough, crude, loyal, violent, and honorable—a sort of Viking-Spartan-samurai motorcycle gang. They eat live worms, sleep on hard surfaces, and desire nothing more than to die in battle. So Okrand filled the language with back-of-the-throat sounds and made up a rich war vocabulary but left out social pleasantries like "Hello." (The closest translation for hello in Klingon is nuqneH —"What do you want?").

Knowing that fans would be watching closely, Okrand worked out a full grammar. He cribbed from natural languages, borrowing sounds and sentence-building rules, switching sources whenever Klingon started operating too much like any one language in particular. He ended up with something that sounds like an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk. The linguistic features of Klingon are not especially unusual (at least to a linguist) when considered independently, but put together, they make for one hell of an alien language.

Despite the fact that more than 250,000 copies of Okrand's Klingon dictionary have been sold, very few people know how the language really works. There are maybe 20 or 30 people who can hold their own in a live, unscripted Klingon conversation and a few hundred or so who are pretty good with written Klingon. But most Star Trek fans who buy the dictionary skip the grammatical rules that constitute the first half of the book and turn straight to the word list. They make up wedding vows, song lyrics, or insults to lob at their opponents in role-playing games, but they ignore the grammar, simply popping dictionary words into English sentences. So Star Trek discussion boards end up peppered with phrases like this: yIn nI' je chep.

That is some seriously bad Klingon. It's a string of words that's supposed to mean "Live long and prosper" but instead says something like "life ... something is long ... and ... something prospers." It's ungrammatical. (Plus, it's a Vulcan sentiment; Klingons don't say such things.)

The correct form of the phrase in Klingon would be yIn nI' DaSIQjaj 'ej bIchepjaj.

And it breaks down (word for word) like this: "Life long you-it-endure-may and you-be-prosperous-may." Or, in proper English, "May you endure a long life and may you prosper."

Klingon sentence structure is about as complex as it gets. Most people are familiar with the idea that verb endings can indicate person and number. In Spanish, the -o suffix on a verb like hablar (to speak) indicates a first-person singular subject (hablo—I speak) while the -amos suffix indicates a first-person plural subject (hablamos—we speak). But Klingon uses prefixes rather than suffixes, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most romance languages, it has 29. There are so many because they indicate not only the person and number of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (whom it is being done to). In the "Live long and prosper" translation above, for example, the Da- on SIQ indicates a second-person subject and a third-person object ("You endure it"), and the bI- on the verb chep indicates a second-person subject and no object ("You prosper").

As if that weren't complicated enough, Klingon also has a large set of suffixes. Attached to the end of the verbs SIQ and chep is the ending -jaj, which expresses "a desire or wish on the part of the speaker that something take place in the future." Klingon has 36 verb suffixes and 26 noun suffixes that express everything from negation to causality to possession to how willing a speaker is to vouch for the accuracy of what he says. By piling on these suffixes, one after the other, you can pack a lot of meaning on to a single word in Klingon—words like nuHegh'eghrupqa'moHlaHbe'law'lI'neS, which translates roughly to: They are apparently unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress).

Just saying a word like this one requires Klingon-like discipline and fortitude. To the layman, the time commitment involved in studying this invented language may seem ridiculous—why not take up a language with practical value, one that might earn you a little respect, or at least not encourage jeers? But Klingon isn't about practicality, or status, or even about love for the original Star Trek series. It's about language for language's sake, and the joy of doing something that's not easy, without regard for worldly recognition. Hence the Klingon Hamlet, which took years to compose and which maybe 100 people can appreciate. What a piece of work is man indeed. Or as Wil'yam Shex'pir would put it, toH, chovnatlh Doj ghaH tlhIngan'e'—"A Klingon is an impressive specimen."

[jimmy olsen]