His Avatar lingo? It's just out of this world

From USC

He speaks a little bit of 15 languages himself and teaches business communication and cross-cultural communication for non-native speakers. But could a Trojan linguistics professor create a mellifluous and musical tongue for aliens, an invented language that might be as successful as his "gold standard," Klingon, the guttural tongue cranked out for the TV show "Star Trek?" Well, audiences will judge for themselves the success of the prof's accomplishment as they head over the holidays to the James Cameron movie, "Avatar," about which critics have raved. The director tapped the linguist in summer, 2005, to begin crafting the speech of the movie characters, the Na'vi, the humanoid denizens on the distant orb of Pandora. While Cameron came in with 30 prospective Na'vi words to give the prof an idea of what he wanted the new language to sound like, it was the expert's job to develop a grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation for the alien tongue. Because the movie has spin-off Wii and X-Box versions, he's gotten to build out further the language, which he hopes might some day be as widely adapted as Klingon -- for which a dictionary has been produced, as has a staged, translated version of Hamlet.

Photo: Prof. Paul Frommer, creator of 'Avatar' language for Na'vi / Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times, 20th Century Fox