Category Archives: General

Kaltxì, ma frapo— As you may know, I’m giving a talk this Saturday at the Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference at UCLA. Since the audience will largely be linguistics students, I thought I’d take the opportunity to expand my standard … Continue reading →

1. Weeks and months As you know, the days of the ’Rrtan week are: Trr’awve Sunday Trrmuve Monday Trrpxeyve Tuesday Trrtsìve Wednesday Trrmrrve Thursday Trrpuve Friday Trrkive Saturday But what about “week” itself and related words? Here’s some useful vocabulary: … Continue reading →

Here’s the first of several posts about weather language. Thanks to the Vocabulary Committee for some great ideas! To begin with, the subject of our discussion: yafkeyk (n.: YA.fkeyk) ‘weather’ To understand the derivation of this word, note the following: … Continue reading →

“Receptive Ability” What’s the Na’vi equivalent of English -able/-ible? That is, how do say that something is capable of “receiving” the action of a verb? For example, given yom ‘eat,’ how would you say, “This animal is edible”—i.e., can be … Continue reading →

A couple of posts ago, in a response to a comment, I mentioned that the following example sentence was correct: Pol säfpìlit verar wivan. ‘He’s keeping his idea a secret.’ Here the verb var ‘persist in a state, continue to … Continue reading →

Kaltxì, ma oeyä eylan— I wanted to fill you in on my Na’vi talks for the first few months of this year, both those in the recent past and those coming up. It’s been gratifying to see that interest in … Continue reading →

The Vocabulary Committee has been working overtime! The February submission was particularly rich, inventive . . . and massive. It’s going to take me a while to work through all the suggestions, discussions, and examples, and getting out the results … Continue reading →

Here’s Part 2 of the new vocabulary post from last time. Some of these words, I think, will turn out to be quite useful. 1. li (adv.) ‘already’ Tìkangkem li hasey lu. ‘The work is already finished.’ Li pol terok … Continue reading →

Kaltxì, ma eylan oeyä— As some of you may know, we now have a structure in place whereby members of the community are submitting not only requests for new vocabulary but actual suggestions for new Na’vi words. (You’ll find information … Continue reading →

Mehapxìtul lì’fyao’loä pxestxelit alor tolìng awngaru. Two members of the German Na’vi community, Plumps (Stefan Müller) and Maksìl (Maximilian Reinhart), have translated three Christmas carols into Na’vi and recorded them. The wonderful singer is Maksìl. Please listen: Maria Kxamlä Na’rìng … Continue reading →