Skxawng!

By BEN ZIMMER
Published: December 4, 2009

When James Cameron’s science-fiction opus “Avatar” comes to the screen this month, audiences will witness meticulously conceived alien characters — speaking a meticulously conceived alien language. To lend extra authenticity to the Na’vi — the tall, blue-skinned, vaguely feline humanoids living on the distant world of Pandora — Cameron enlisted the help of a linguist to construct a full-fledged language, with its own peculiar phonetics, lexicon and syntax. From the mind of Paul Frommer, a professor at the University of Southern California, was born a Na’vi language, with mellifluous vowel clusters, popping ejectives and a grammatical system elaborate enough to make a polyglot blush. More

QotD

Were you to reject all Jews or African-Americans or Canadians, you would show discreditable bias — anti-Semitism or racism or some weird anti-commonwealth hostility. (You can’t blame an entire nation for Cirque du Soleil.) More

Happy Christmas from Doctor Who

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