29.3155, Linguistics and Pop-Culture: Atlantis: The Lost Empire

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3155. Mon Aug 13 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3155, Linguistics and Pop-Culture: Atlantis: The Lost Empire

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Editor for this issue: Becca Morris <becca at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2018 12:06:41
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Linguistics and Pop-Culture: Atlantis: The Lost Empire

 
Hello LINGUIST List readers and subscribers!

Following this year’s Fund Drive theme we’re going to take a look at the movie
Atlantis: The Lost Empire, an animated Disney movie from 2001. This movie was
one of my all time favorites as a child, I even had a Barbie of the main
character. In this movie Milo James Thatch, voiced by Micheal J. Fox, is a
linguist and cartographer at the Smithsonian Institute. He believes that he
can find The Shepherd’s Journal, which is an ancient manuscript that contains
directions to Atlantis. It is safe to say that this movie is likely the first
time I ever heard of linguistics and maybe watching this movie as much as I
did primed me to be a linguist. Atlantis: The Lost Empire was briefly
mentioned by our editor Sarah Robinson in her awesome ConLangs series here
(https://blog.linguistlist.org/fund-drive/a-history-of-conlangs-part-ii-how-hu
man-is-alien-language-science-fiction-klingon-and-language/) on our blog
because this movie contains a ConLang: Atlantean.

This movie starts out with Atlantean dialogue with English subtitles, the
scene is the destruction of the city and what the citizens do to preserve what
they can of Atlantis resulting in it being hidden from the rest of the world.
After the opening scene we see Milo, who while at work dwells in the boiler
room (I feel like this is par for the course for a linguist, yeah?),
describing a translation error of an Old Norse text. Milo is criticized for
his research on Atlantean and is not taken seriously, which leads to him being
hired to go on an expedition to find the city of Atlantis. The person who
hires Milo exclaims that the crew is complete except that they need an expert
in gibberish, aka Atlantean. Does this feel familiar anyone?

Atlantean script is prevalent throughout the movie. Until the expedition crew
gets to Atlantis, the script is mainly seen in The Shepherd’s Journal, which
was found by the expedition crew on a previous expedition. Upon arriving in
Atlantis, Milo discovers that Atlanteans can speak multiple languages and he
hypothesizes that Atlantean must be based on a root dialect like The Tower of
Babel. Milo explains the grammatical system of Atlantean by saying:

“...if you deconstruct Latin, you overlaid it with some Sumerian, throw in a
dash of Thessalonian you’d be getting close to their grammatical structure.”

It turns out that Milo is the only one who can read Atlantean because the
knowledge of how to read Atlantean was lost in The Great Flood that ruined
city. Milo helps the main Atlantean character Kida, voiced by Cree Summer,
translate ancient Atlantean murals throughout the city to help return Atlantis
to its former glory. Not only can Milo read and translate Atlantean, on the
fly I might add, but he can also speak it. When speaking with Kida in
Atlantean he asks how is accent is, which I’m sure every linguist reading this
has done with a native speaker. The addition of this small detail was very
much appreciated. For those interested, she said Milo’s accent was “boorish,
provincial, and you speak it through your nose”.

The Atlantean language developed for this movie was created by Marc Okrand,
who is also responsible for the creation of Klingon. Okrand created Atlantean
by including a large inventory of Indo-European words and Atlantean can be
described as being highly agglutinative. Inspiration for Atlantean was drwn
from Sumerian and North American languages. Atlantean is based on historical
reconstructions and is inspired by the fantasy of Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
There are two main fictional principles surrounding the creation of the
Atlantean language: Atlantean is intended to be a “Tower of Babel
language”/”root dialect” of all languages, and Atlantean has existed without
change since before 100,000 B.C., which is the First or Second age of
Atlantis.

The writing system for Atlantean was created by John Emerson with the help of
Marc Okrand and draws its inspiration from ancient alphabetical scripts,
Semitic being the main inspiration. There is no capitalization or punctuation
in Atlantean, and the character for ‘a’ was created with the intention of
being a map of the city. Atlantean is also written using the boustrophedon
writing system, so lines are written and read left to right for the first
line, and then right to left for the following line, and then back to left to
right, etc.

Since Milo, mentioned the grammatical system of Atlantean I will also mention
it briefly. The word order in Atlantean is strictly SOV. Adjectives and nouns
that are of genitive case follow the nouns that they modify. Postpositions are
the only type of adpositions present in Atlantean. Modal verbs follow the
verbs they modify and also take on all personal and aspectual suffixes. In
contrast, adverbs come before the verbs they modify. An interrogative particle
is also utilized in Atlantean; however, the formation of questions does not
affect the word order.

All-in-all, Milo can be chalked up to being considered one of the movie
linguist archetypes. He seemed to be more of a translator than a linguist, but
the film is still delightful and there were some additions, like the question
of the accent that were appreciated as a linguist. Some of the things about
Atlantean mentioned in this movie, like that the language has existed without
change since 100,000 B.C. is very unrealistic even if this society has existed
in isolation since 100,000 B.C. If you haven’t seen Atlantis: The Lost Empire
I highly recommend it.

Here at The LINGUIST List we are dedicated to providing you, our readers and
subscribers, with knowledge of all things linguistic. This year’s fund drive
theme is geared towards discussing how our field is portrayed in media and
pop-culture. Thanks to our donors and users we are able to continue to
providing you all with information on all things linguistic. Please consider
donating here (https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/) to ensure that we
can continue to provide this service to all of you. Thank you!

Sincerely,

- The LL Team

(Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis%3A_The_Lost_Empire, https://e
n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantean_language)







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