Atlantean language

Overview

Disney hired Marc Okrand, PhD Linguistics University of California Berkley, to create the language of the Atlanteans for Atlantis: The Lost Empire between 1997 and 2001. Okrand was known for creating the Klingon language, the most famous constructed language ever, though other professional constructed language makers existed.

Atlantean was left unexplained due to the movie's lack of success, and fan dicipherment is on-going and frutiful, cracking some 200 words out of 300. The success of such efforts is summarized on the webpage of The Atlantean Language Group and on its Yahoo Group:

http://www.freewebs.com/keran_shadlag/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/atlantean_language/

The language is intended as a "Proto-World", a language from which all languages came. Such a language is scientificially phesible, although its reconstruction is generally held to be impossible, due to the among of time involved. Atlantean, in contrast with Klingon, is therefore a synthesis of phonology, word roots, and syntax common to all world languages. What follows is a very brief, but cutting edge treatment:

'

Phonetics

(Presented in fan-created alphabetical order.)

a b g d e w h i y k l m u n o p r s sh t

All letters correspond to their International Phonetic Alphabet equivalent, except:

h voicless velar fricative, orthographically like Chinese

y voiced palatal approximate, like English y in yes

sh voiceless postalveolar fricative

Althought English-speaking actors used English's muti-vowel system to pronounce it, Atlantean vowels are actually distinguished by length: a aa e ee i ii u uu o Pseudo-diphthongs ay, ey, and aw are known.

Phonology

There isn't much, aside from verb inflection.

Morphology

Noun-Modifier-Number-Case

yob-mok-en-tem

'crystal-great-plural-Oblique'

'the great crystal'

Modifiers: mok large

Case: Nominative, Accusative/Dative (pronouns) or Oblique (nouns), Genitive, Essetive, Vocative

Verb-Aspect-Tense-Person

bernot-g-i-mot

'bring-possible-past-3S'

'he could have brought'

Aspects: l emphatic g possible s obligatory

Tenses: i past e present o future

Adjectives and Adverbs take a few parts-of-speech specific suffixes.

Syntax

SOV with Noun Adjective, Noun Postposition, Phrase Postposition, general Nominative Dative, yet Adverb Verb.

Example (the most complicated sentence we have):

Ke-tak-en-tem obes-ag sapoh-e-kik yos lat nar badeg-bey tikud-e-tot dap?

Sing-fish-PL-OBL lava-GN view-Present-1S that.Subject what place good-SUPR be.located-Present-3S question.word.y/n+ ?

'Where is the best place from which to view the lava whales?'

There are 3 syntactic particles:

yos "The clause discusses the subject."

deg "This clause discusses the subject."

bet "with reference to; for"

Final Comments

I am currently the lead decipherer. Diciphering/learning Atlantean has been really, really fun and has helped with with every langauge I have learned, including my current study of Chinese. I originally was just interested in the writing system. Okrand's Atlantean has changed my life by getting me interested in writing systems, philology, and historical linguistics.