Talk:Naʼvi language/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Frommer

Frommer claims the lang has cases for trans. subj, intrans. subj, and objects. However, from the sample sentences, that doesn't appear to be the case--unless they were uttered by avatars, who Frommer intentionally had make mistakes. kwami (talk) 08:50, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Barely listable as a Constructed language at all at present, IMHO, given the limited vocabulary and comments such as "the only one to understand its grammar is its creator" sourced from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8408245.stm (the "sample of Na'vi writing" photo on that article is risible, IMHO).

More to follow, I'm sure, but at present not overly convinced and no "excuses" of lack of budget and time acceptable! Regards, David. Harami2000 (talk) 22:53, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Similar comments could be made of several of the obscure conlangs that we include merely for historical interest. This will probably get more hits in the coming year than any conlang apart from Eo, Klingon, and Tolkien's stuff, even if the movie bombs. kwami (talk) 22:24, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Based on the sound samples given in the NYT "On Language" article, and the wordlist giving hrrap as "dangerous," we can say that rr is a uvular trill. We have hints at at least two more sentences, and the suggestion of an infix:

Those things are dangerous.  u fo lu(?) hrrap  thing they be danger
They can kill a person, you know.  tsun tute tspivang ko  able person kill?

The word list gives tspang as kill. Lenition and an infix might account for tspivang. WmAnnis (talk) 03:04, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

More evidence for -iv- infix (an not internal lenition) is the last sound example. I can't clarify everything in first part ("we were careful"), but "not to get to close" seems to be fteke nìhawng livok, with lok being the word for "close." WmAnnis (talk) 03:32, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

There's a lot of internal morphology to work out; thanks for this, somehow I overlooked that sound clip. But the rr sounds perfectly alveolar to me, just syllabic. kwami (talk) 22:24, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

D'oh! You're right. I was so focused on the second example (which does still seem ambiguous to me) that I missed the first, which is clearly alveolar. WmAnnis (talk) 00:02, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Okay, morphology sketched out a bit. We have some idea of the categories the unmentioned morphemes may fall into, so that should help with things like -iv-, -ìyev-, -eng- (not that we should add them to hte article). kwami (talk) 11:47, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Now that we know there are mood and dependency markers for the first position slot, I'm guessing ‹iv› is dependency infix. But, as you say, that's too speculative for the main article. WmAnnis (talk) 16:41, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

From the first example, I'd think it might be an evidential in the 2nd slot. kwami (talk) 17:03, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

-ru

If -ru is to be the dative in the first example phrase (nga-ru), it should probably be so in the second (oe-ru)... unless I'm missing some bigger point. WmAnnis (talk) 23:41, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Oops, you're right! kwami (talk) 00:55, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

The genitive -yä?

Currently the article has the footnote "Genitives are not attested on nouns, but are on two pronouns, po → peyä and nga → ngeyä." However, in the word list that has escaped into the wild is the phrase: Utral Aymokriyä Tree of Voices (utral tree, mokri voice). WmAnnis (talk) 14:16, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Ah yes, thank you. The pronouns could well be irregular, or perhaps there's an -e form that means s.t. else.

Or perhaps the suffix is -iyä, and the i fuses into the previous vowel, making an e out of o or a? Any more examples of it out there? kwami (talk) 16:04, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

None that I have seen. WmAnnis (talk) 16:29, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Another example, with an allomorph -ä instead of -yä (from Science Magazine): tìftia kifkeyä "study of the physical world (kifkey)," his best idea at the word for "science." WmAnnis (talk) 22:02, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Fìskxawngìri - a topic?

Although *fìskxawngri does not, as far as I can tell, break any phonological rules, given the word's position (first) and that we already know -ri is a topic marker, might not -ìri be a conditioned realization of -ri ? I'm not bold enough to edit the main article regarding this point unless someone else agrees with me. :) WmAnnis (talk) 16:26, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Ah, good catch. Yes, I agree. Can't be sure, of course, but it's a good enough bet for me. I have a feeling the case suffixes have different forms after consonants & vowels, the way Turkish does. And if we're wrong, maybe Frommer will tell us how.

Can you figure out why we sometimes get e at the ends of words? And there's a fairly common suffix -te. kwami (talk) 16:37, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Any examples on word-final e? And I can see no pattern in the -te suffix. Maybe Frommer just likes the sound of it? WmAnnis (talk) 17:08, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, "place" is s.t. tseng and s.t. tsenge, according to the word list, and there are others like that. Also tu is a suffix? for "person", but tute is the word "person". I suppose tu could be short for tute, though. kwami (talk) 17:43, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Ah. And there's srak(e). My guess would be that it's a prosodic matter. It's not unusual in some languages for a word to take a different form when it's at the end of an intonation unit (see "pausal form" in Arabic or Hebrew grammar, for example). WmAnnis (talk) 17:49, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Development/influences

Since this is a conlang, do you think there should be a section somewhere on the development of the language (Zimmer's NYT article seems to have some stuff to say on that) and what real-life languages were drawn on as influences (this older LL posting says a little bit on that)? rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:12, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

It is normal to distinguish internal from external histories for those constructed languages that exist in a literary context (see any of the larger accounts of Tolkien's languages, for example). To the degree that we know the external history of Na'vi, I agree we should include such a section. Right now we don't know too much about that, though. WmAnnis (talk) 17:25, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, the external history is what I was mainly referring to (stuff like how Frommer and his people decided what phonemes to include, etc.). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:28, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

I've added a History section and included what we know so far of how the language was developed. I didn't include the languages that Frommer drew upon; that could be included, but I'm not certain what to say about it, since each of the features he included is found in multiple languages, and the combination of features is not found in any language. Which is basically what I said in the section. - Erimeyz --76.17.0.169 (talk) 19:58, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Underlining

Yesterday I saw a book on Avatar including a Na'vi-English lexicon, in which certain syllables were underlined. e.g. eltu si, be attentive, stop goofing off. What is the significance of the underlining? Should this be in the article? --Hugh7 (talk) 07:44, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

It's an ad-hoc means of indicating stress. It's not part of the orthography. I think at Wiktionary we've decided to go with acute accents, because underlining isn't copy friendly. (We've already had errors creep in because of it.) kwami (talk) 08:08, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

formal register

per Frommer on lang log, besides the PN changes, there's also a formality marker on the verb. kwami (talk) 08:39, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

r or ɾ ???

Is the r-like phoneme [r] (an alveolar trill) or [ɾ] (an alveolar tap)? The article says "The rr is strongly trilled" but also "The r is flapped, as in Spanish and Indonesian; it sounds a bit like the tt or dd in the American pronunciation of the words latter / ladder." Which one is it? --AndreRD (talk) 08:35, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

R is a flap, rr is a syllabic trill. kwami (talk) 17:14, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Oh so there are two phonemes? The table of consonants only lists the tap. --AndreRD (talk) 22:04, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

That's because the /r/ is considered a vowel. At least it behaves as one. Whether they're really two phonemes or not I don't know. kwami (talk) 06:15, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Influences

Anyone else hearing the resemblance to Nahuatl or is it just me? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.230.124.41 (talk) 05:00, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

It seems there may have been some attempt to have Na'vi recall Amerindian languages. But I don't know about Nahua specifically. kwami (talk) 07:20, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree. The plosives kx and tx espcially recall some classical Mayan sounds. upakal (talk) 10:36, 02 January 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Upakal (talk • contribs)

They recall lots of languages: Western North America, Western South America, Eastern & Southern Africa, the Caucasus, and Eastern Siberia. We'd need more than that to single out Mayan or even Amerindian. kwami (talk) 19:59, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

nother sentence

Per Langlog, emailed by Frommer:

Ke fparmìl oel futa lu tute a tsun nì-Na'vi set fìfya pivlltxe!

"I didn't think there was anyone who could speak Na'vi like that at this point!"

Can we gloss it?

ke	fparmìl	oe-l	futa	lu	tute	a	tsun	nì-Na'vi	set	fì-fya	p<iv>lltxe
not	think?	I-erg	that?	be	person	which	can	in-Na'vi	now	this-way	speak<?>

It would appear from this that -iv- is not passive voice, and that lu is not a copula; also, why is oe in the ergative? kwami (talk) 19:38, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Could not lu be both copula and existential? Regarding oel, we can "think good thoughts" in English. Perhaps the Na'vi can, too. The <iv> infix also occurs in the NYTimes voice sample in a verb used after tsun "be able" — tsun tute-t tsp<iv>ang (-ko). It may be some sort of combined mood/dependency marker. WmAnnis (talk) 03:53, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

more affixes

Could hasey "done, finished" be another participial form, h<as>ey maybe? kwami (talk) 22:40, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Wondering if the he in ohe could be the same as the he in kehe 'no', lahe 'other', and the e in srake 'yes'. kwami (talk) 23:28, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Also, we need to work out which preps cause lenition. mi` and ftu do, but I don't want to mark them as the remainder don't necessarily don't. kwami (talk) 01:12, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

I hesitate to speculate too freely about hasey. How do we know ftu causes lenition? WmAnnis (talk) 03:50, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Because "from that" is ftu sat.

There are lots of semantically similar words that are phonetically similar too, and I don't know how many of them might be explicit morphology. For example, "to become" is slu, which is suggestively similar to lu. kwami (talk) 04:18, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm guessing the <arm> is PST.IMPV: Past <am> <i`m> parallel to future <i`y> <ay>. kwami (talk) 23:57, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

And that s- again, maybe, in sìltsan 'good' vs nìltsan 'well'. kwami (talk) 04:35, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Is the s- coming from si (do/make)? Common words are often "streamlined", maybe the noun root of "good" is "ìlstan". Do we have many attested examples of the use of sìltsan? Also Si+lu = slu seems plausible (make-be). Seppukitty (talk) 18:25, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Naw, I asked Frommer about this, and he said that nìlstan is just a contraction of *nìsìlstan, which would've been too long. Slu is a separate root; no derivational connection (not yet, at least) to lu. kwami (talk) 01:32, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

what does the "ugh!" mean in the verbs section?

Na'vi language#Verbs

""was able to (ugh!)".

?? --Ioscius ^(talk) 23:33, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

It's a verbal inflection that expresses distaste on the part of the speaker, as explained in the article. (We're open to suggestions for a better translation.) kwami (talk) 00:15, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi kwami, I see that now. But unless I'm missing something, this pejorative inflection is explained after this example appears. Perhaps we could have a different example in this ones place, or an explanation of this subject before this example? What do you think? If I'm missing something, could you kindly point out where? Thanks. --Ioscius ^(talk) 18:08, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, there are lots of things that appear before they're explained, like case. I don't want to make up sentences, since our data is so limited. kwami (talk) 21:42, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Sure, I can appreciate that. Circa 1000 words isn't a hell of a lot to work with. But I might persuade that case is much more (subjectively of course. by no means do I claim that case function is widely understood...) intelligible than a (seemingly) random (ugh!). I will try my hand and if you don't like it, feel free to tweak or revert. Cool? --Ioscius ^(talk) 22:52, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, good. I relegated it to a footnote, though. kwami (talk) 23:58, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Ok, hopefully as more data becomes available we can tweak that (see below) to a more specific link.--Ioscius ^(talk) 00:05, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

"The a affix is optional for derived le- adjectives after a noun"

Do we have a single, official example of a le- derived adjective with the attributive a affix? If not, that sentence should be removed. WmAnnis (talk) 22:13, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

I only have a private email from Frommer, from when I asked him why lefpom does not have an a:

The one time you don't need to use the adjectival a is with le- adjectives that follow the noun. (Having two consecutive markers in a row relating to adjectives seemed redundant. Also, I bet the a + le- combination would tend to decay over time on phonological grounds.) It's not wrong to put in the a in such cases, but it can be optionally omitted, and usually is. If a le- adjective precedes its noun, however, you need the a.

Hopefully he'll write s.t. publicly. kwami (talk) 22:50, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Ah! Well, that's an impeccable source, then. WmAnnis (talk) 01:51, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm weeks late to the discussion, but I'll note that while this is indeed an impeccable source, it's in no way a verifiable source - which means it can't be used for Wikipedia. This is exactly the kind of thing I and others are talking about elsewhere on this page. - Erimeyz - 69.45.101.10 (talk) 22:30, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Digraphs in x

I don't want to mess around in the text right now, as it looks like serious people are hard at work on it, but the following is perhaps worthy of comment:

"In both transcriptions, the ejective consonants are written with digraphs in x, a convention that appears to be unique to Na’vi."

This may well derive from Esperanto as rendered in ASCII text. Writtern Esperanto includes the exceedingly rare diacritically modified letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ. One of the conventions for representing Esperanto in flat text is to transform these into the digraphs cx, gx, jx, sx, and ux. See Esperanto Orthography.

--Craigkbryant (talk) 18:52, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Eo does not have ejectives, and there's no reason to think there's any connection. Other languages actually use tx and kx, which Eo does not. kwami (talk) 20:40, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

ma: particle or adposition

Does it really make sense to stick ma in with the adpositions? While plenty of languages have vocative cases, it's not clear to me a vocative particle (Greek ὦ, Arabic yaa) is much like an adposition. There's nothing in the existing corpus to suggest it is. WmAnnis (talk) 16:17, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

In general, genitives aren't much like a case either ...

I don't know if ma is an adposition or not. I've only ever seen it before nouns, whereas a particle would likely be more flexible than that. Put it where you want for now; the deciding factor will probably be whether it is restricted to pre-NP and enclitic position, of if it has a freer order. kwami (talk) 23:47, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Grammar...

How can an article with the line:

understanding of its grammar is limited to the language's creator.

contain a section on grammar? Isn't that OR...? 80.192.26.229 (talk) 11:29, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Maybe because it isn't the case. Here's the first official bit of Na'vi from the man himself Frommer's first post to Language Log.

Prof Wrong (talk) 11:39, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

A summary of the bits of grammar we know isn't the same as actually understanding the grammar. You couldn't speak the language knowing only what little we have here. kwami (talk) 11:41, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Please delete this article

Is it serious to have such an elaborated article of an invented language? An invented language which only appeared in a mediocre film (I mean Avatar) that will be forgotten by history? Please, don't make a circus out of wikipedia —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.33.19.129 (talk) 15:55, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Read Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Na'vi language. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:11, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm glad you didn't make it abundantly clear how biased you were against this article. I'm sure you're up for deleting Sindarin and Quenya as well, considering they're just languages in those "mediocre" books that have become national British folklore and had three epic movies made out of them as well. 98.244.243.96 (talk) 16:27, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

The article certainly shouldn't be deleted, but the vast majority of the content should be. This is almost 100% OR -- the creator of the language has not released this much information, so most of this has been deconstructed from utterances, and the phrases included do not show their source. At least one of the phrases clearly wasn't taken from the film or the game ("I didn't think there was anyone who could speak Na’vi like that at this point!") and it is not clear whether this was written by Frommer or some other enthusiast learner on the net.

Furthermore, much of the "canon" of Na'vi sentences are wrong... on purpose. I read in an interview (no reference to hand, sorry) that the people playing Avatars -- ie "learners" of Na'vi in the film/game -- were specifically allowed to fluff their lines without correction, in order to simulate learner mistakes in their lines.

It is absolutely vital that this sort of attribution is given so that the accuracy of the source material used can be verified. EG:

Tense and aspect need not be marked when they can be understood by context or elsewhere in the sentence.

For example,

inOe-hu Txewì trr-am na’rìng-mi t‹a‹r›m›ok. Ts‹ol›e’a ...

I-with (name) day-? forest-in exist‹pst›‹impv› see‹pfv›

"Yesterday I was with Txewì in the forest, (and we) saw ..."

Who said that? Who was with Txewì in the forest? Were they Na'vi? Prof Wrong (talk) 13:52, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

The creator of the language has released a good deal of information. See Some highlights of Na'vi. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 14:50, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

You're right, we should add the links. The Txewi quote was from the NYT article.

You have a point about OR, but Frommer's said he will go over the parsing in this article and let us know if we got anything wrong, though at the moment I think he's still a bit overwhelmed with the response from the movie coming out. His posting on langlog was at least partially to give us the refs we needed, and you'll notice he picked the most troublesome text we had for his analysis.

Oh, some of the reason for giving all the examples, which you seem to find excessive, is to illustrate things we can't analyze with complete confidence. Once we're able to better describe the language, we should be able to condense its description somewhat. kwami (talk) 21:39, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm not against examples, as long as there's a source. (Other language articles don't always do this and use specifically constructed example sentences, but as there's a large base of native or otherwise-fluent speakers for most languages, I don't see that as a problem.)

I've seen Frommer's Language Log post, but this article goes way beyond that. Frommer may come and edit too, but that's still no good, because it still places Wikipedia as the primary source, with the inability to cite any external sources for what it shows. That's against WP policy.Prof Wrong (talk) 23:56, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

The langlog posting was so that we wouldn't be the primary source. He will hopefully post more once things die down a bit. Meanwhile, the examples come from several other sources besides langlog. kwami (talk) 02:01, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

(deindenting) WP is still functioning as a primary source for much of the information. Examples of stuff not on the Langlog posting:

Attributive adjective marker not mentioned on LL.

Tense and aspect need not be marked when they can be understood by context or elsewhere in the sentence. Not stated on LL. This has been inferred from an example. (OR)

Prof Wrong (talk) 08:44, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Try the LL posting from Frommer that we link to in the ref section. Both are covered there. kwami (talk) 08:56, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

rest of NY Times

Maybe we can work out the other NYTimes phrases well enough to add them to the article? Even if not, they still are useful:

Oe-hu Txewì trr-am ná’rìng-mi t<arm>ok.

I-with T. day-? forest-in exist<pst.imfv>

Yesterday I was with Txewì in the forest

(sounds like ná’rìngi, but maybe that's just assimilation)

Ts<ol>e'a sie[?]-tute-t a-tsawl fra-to mì-sìrei.

see<pfv> trap?-person-ACC ATTR-big every-than in-life

and we saw the biggest Trapper I've ever seen.

It seems the comparative works as big(ger) than-every(one) in (my) life. Here the pfv is used in the past tense w/o past tense marking, as the time has been set up by the previous clause. kwami (talk) 01:09, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

trr-am as yesterday seems like a pretty safe bet since it is in the English gloss. I would assume it is a combination of day and back (trr + 'ìm), maybe based on an older form like English "today". Seppukitty (talk) 21:04, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Ah, of course, it looks like PST am, used as a suffix since it's on a noun. If we get trray "tomorrow", that would seal it. kwami (talk) 06:07, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Movie clip

Okay, found a clip of the part of the movie 10 minutes in when Jake first meets Sigourney Weaver, and can work most of it out. (I haven't seen the movie, if you can't tell.) The other guy is easy to follow, even if he makes mistakes, but Weaver is nearly unintelligible--it's only by back-translating that I can guess what she's saying, and we don't have "to sound like" or "formal" in the dictionary, so we're sunk there. But we do get some new forms with the rest: 'five', 'one' (the pronoun--wasn't clear in the dict), inclusive possessive,

'awve ultxari ohengeyä

first meeting-top we.incl.dual.hon.poss

nawma sa'nok lrrtok s‹iv›‹ei›i

great mother smile do‹sjv›‹laud›

"May the Great Mother smile upon our first meeting."

tsun t‹iv›am.

be.able suffice‹sjv›

"Not bad."

eli'? nìhawng? iskepek? lu.

? too.much  ? be

~ "You (still) sound (a bit) too formal (though)."

zìsìt (t)onmrr ft‹ol›ia ohe.

year five? study‹pfv› I.hon

slä zene fko n‹ev›ume nì.txan

but must one learn‹form?› much

"I studied for five years but there is much to learn."

Since he's using formal pronouns, I wonder if that <ev> might be the formal inflection of the verbs. Looks a bit like the subjunctive, which makes sense. kwami (talk) 11:24, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

ayli'u ngeyä ni'ìt(sic) tskxe-pek? lu.

words you<gen> bit stone-like? be.

Is what she seems to be *trying* to say.

Seppukitty (talk) 07:55, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Well after a few minor changes to the above and searching through the list of words given in the survival guide, I think it breaks down like this:

ayli'u ngeyä ni'ìt(nì'it) tskxe pak lu.

words you<gen> a bit stone(disparaging part.) be.

Seppukitty (talk) 08:20, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Wow. As an actor, wouldn't she have to do dialects once in a while? and have some slight insight into her own pronunciation? kwami (talk) 08:52, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Hm, I don't know if the disparaging particle would go with being too formal. But could be--makes as much sense as anything I can come up with. kwami (talk) 10:38, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Looks like we have the formal infix:

Ngenga, ’itan O., luyu set.

You are (thou art) now a son of the Omaticaya.

(Sounds like he's saying "Omatikayoä". Wonder if that's another allomorph, or just his pronunciation.)

Na’viyä, luyu hapxì.

"You are part of the People."

kwami (talk) 14:30, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I don't quite believe in the formal infixes yet. This could also be explained as Immediate Future + Imperfective. er + ìy = uy

You now will be a son of the Omaticaya.

You now will be a part of the People.

If there was an formal infix, wouldn't the scientist who talked formal use it? Also as the leader of the tribe, he may not have to be formal while everyone else must be formal to him. Or he could very well have a high looking down on low formal language, which could be different from low (social status) looking up to high constructions. Seems like the pronouns have formality, like Japanese, but the verb infixes seem pretty standard across social situations to me from what I've heard so far. (<ev> is a seperate subject I have my own theories about.)

Seppukitty (talk) 16:27, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

That scientist might've dropped it after Weaver told him he was being too formal. The only place that infix occurs is in the highly ritualized context of the initiation ceremony; that's also the only place, other than the single pronoun from the guy before being corrected by Weaver, where I've noticed the formal pronouns. Frommer called it formal language, not respect language, and a ceremonial situation typically calls for that on all sides. He also said all the formal language was was a verbal infix and a couple pronouns. Also, the context wasn't immediate future, it was present: he had just been initiated. Or perhaps it is the words "you are now" (set "now") that made it final; either way, it's present tense. Also, the translation is from the US version, which seems to be pretty close to the Na'vi (the UK version took more license), and that is present tense. kwami (talk) 17:34, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Aha, formal =! respect. Thank you for that. Sounds good, I still think that <ev> is the optative mood.  :)

Seppukitty (talk) 19:44, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Hm, that makes sense with kìy‹ev›ame "See you soon", but not after a deontic modal, as in Zene fko n‹ev›ume nìtxan "there is much to learn". My guess (though just a guess) is that it's an imperfective subjunctive ("may that I will be seeing you soon"), and that ov is a perfective subjunctive. kwami (talk) 19:57, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I was just hoping that he had mispronounced that sentence but what you are saying makes a lot of sense. It also begs the question does the subjunctive set of moods have their own infix position, since they don't seem to combine like perfect/imperfect moods do with the tenses?

Also, if respect is not part of the equation, I don't understand why anyone would learn the formal language before the every day use language. Seppukitty (talk) 20:10, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

It's common to learn polite language first. Much safer to be overly polite and sound a bit distant than to be overly familiar and cause offense. Also, the nuances between politeness, formality, respect, and humility aren't always easy to grasp. He might've learned all the forms but was not yet sure in which situation to use which: he might've taken it as the equivalent of saying "Ma'am" or using last names.

The tenses don't all fuse either--there's that REC-IMM in "I was just about to kill him" which are just in sequence. It might be that aspect fuses with tense and mood, but tense and mood don't fuse with themselves or each other. Or it could just be random: sequences that Frommer thought might lend themselves to fusion historically he fused, and sequences that he thought didn't he left agglutinative. (Also makes me wonder if our unidentified el could possibly be an imperfective perfective or vice versa like they have in Slavic.) kwami (talk) 20:21, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I had not seen the REC-IMM combination before. Your reasoning seems pretty solid, but I won't even try to fathom what an imperfective perfective would be. As a side note, as you seem to be taking care of this article have you thought much about the particle ko? As in Makto-ko! and when Tsu'tey tells the initiate warriors to climb the vines. Could this be the "Let's ___" form of the imperative? Seppukitty (talk) 20:59, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand them myself (something about a contained event within an uncontained one, or vice versa), and I don't know if Frommer would add that level of complexity. It's idle speculation based on what the forms look like, nothing more.

IMP.PL ko wouldn't work for Tsun tutet tspivang ko, where according to the translation it appears to be a tag question. What's the context for Makto-ko ? kwami (talk) 05:52, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Hey, do you know where I can find the Na'vi clips from the movie? (Or the game, if there's any there.) I can stream the movie, but it isn't easy to navigate, and I'd like to be able to play it syllable by syllable. Esp. Saldana is generally very clear. kwami (talk) 06:12, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

The Learn Na'vi community has some files on the "Learn Na'vi – Audio" board. They also had a collection of many of the Na'vi samples from the movie, but due to it being copyrighted material they had to take that down. Sebastian Goll (talk) 15:59, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Sadly, you still have to go see the movie. Which is where I heard Makto-ko! Tsu'tey says it after they first take Jake to Hometree and all of the different races of Na'vi say it when the set off to ride with Jake. I forgot about that sentence, from the NYT article. Taking that into consideration then I think it may be like the Japanese particle zo, which I'm not sure I really know how to explain in linguistic terms, but would be natural to use in both those situations. Seppukitty (talk) 18:14, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

I can pick out words, like "calm" when she kills the wounded whatever-it-is, and "fire(s)" when she douses the torch, but without subtitles, not enough to glean any useful info. Should be better once the subtitles start up.

"This is a matter for the Tsahik" sounds like tsahik-u txele lu. Might the dative be -u after a consonant? (Maybe it's just -hu ) And could the reply be ma zamunge, with the vocative particle? It sounds like wa, but then Neytiri's next use of the vocative also sounds rather like wa.

Also, "I will look at this alien" seems to be Fìketuwong-ti oel steftxaw. The ti is stressed. Could also be -ìti; there's time for another vowel in there.) Maybe -t for the ACC is just a short form, rather than a nominal vs. pronominal form? kwami (talk) 01:38, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Frommer adds a y between the infix ei and a root i: Ngaru irayo seiyi oe nìmun "I thank you again". kwami (talk) 05:21, 8 January 2010 (UTC)