understatement is overrated

First of all, irayo nìtxan to community members Tokahriem, Teriosay, and Karyu Neytiri for proofreading the translation to find the slips/typos and for making good suggestions for some of the lines!

I chose this scene because it gave me a chance to contrast the Forest and Reef dialects, which was fun. In my own communication I prefer to stick to Forest because I'm more familiar with it, we know more about it, and I just kinda prefer it atm (I think this is the case for most speakers tbh, though there are at least one or two who now default to Reef I think), but it's fun to dip my toes into Reef every once in a while if the situation calls for it.

uturu vs. utùru, toruk vs. torùk, etc. Fans watching the video who aren't familiar with the language might be confused as to why the same word is sometimes spelled with ù and sometimes not. This is a dialect difference. Reef distinguishes between the ù and u sounds, Forest does not.

Similarly, tsy in Forest is pronounced ch in Reef, hence the Forest spelling of "Jake", Tsyeyk, becoming Cheyk when Tonowari says it (actually, funnily enough "Cheyksùli" sounds quite a bit closer to the original English "Jake Sully" than "Tsyeyksuli" does lol. The reason I did not include the ù in Suli even though that'd be closer to "Sully" is because in the actual audio you can still hear Tonowari pronounce it Suli, as the Omatikaya do in A1. I guess Jake's just used to being known as Suli now hrh)

dropping "lu" According to KP (language creator), Reef Na'vi has a tendency to drop the word "lu" sometimes, but we don't currently have much information on when exactly this happens. As such I was very hesitant to actually do it. In the original version of my script I simply didn't drop any, just in case. Teriosay and Neytiri suggested a few lines were it might be able to drop, and for the final version I took roughly half of those suggestions. These lines were:

Ayoe [lu] sute wione. Ayngari [lu] sute na'rìnge. Bun [lu] flì fori. [lu] foru reypay vrrtepe! [lu] nawma eyktan tsame Torùk Makto.

ngä'än Also according to KP, Reef Na'vi has a tendency to sometimes turn unstressed ä into e, but again we don't currently have much information on where. For the sake of differentiating Forest and Reef in this video I went ahead and converted all the unstressed ä's by default, but ran into a problem with ngä'än.

If I change the unstressed ä into e but leave the stressed one as-it, I get nge'än. Simple enough, right? But wait: Reef drops the glottal stop between non-identical vowels (for example, za'u becomes zau. Between identical vowels, this drop is optional—rì'ìr can become rììr or remain rì'ìr). So if ngä'än changes to nge'än, does it further change to ngeän because the vowels are no longer identical??

Buuuuut then speaker Tekre reminded me that the word rä'ä, which is one of the few we have explicit Reef examples of from KP, does not become re'ä let alone reä, so unless KP changes his mind about that, this is probably one of the cases where unstressed ä does not change. so in the end I just left ngä'än as-is lol.

It's possible that in the future we could get further information that changes this, as well as the places where lu should be dropped, but for now I'm rolling with it.

…ka la’a atxan tswolayon In the original version of my script I used the word ngim, but Karyu Neytiri suggested txan; she said that ngim might still be ok but that txan felt more natural to her in this context. I still liked the sound of ngim, but given that Neytiri has far more experience with the language than I do, I trusted her judgment on this one and changed it.

"It seems Eywa has turned her back on you" Speaking of Karyu Neytiri, in a later conversation she mentioned that she translated this line as lam fwa Eywal ngati nadu. I translated it as datsìng ngati Eywal.

Neytiri's translates back to English as "it seems that Eywa disapproves of you." Mine translates back as roughly "[I] suppose Eywa abandons you". Both versions work, I think, just thought it was interesting to see the differences :)

I thought you said D, B, and G didn't exist in Na'vi! They don't.....in the Forest dialect ;)

Syllables that start with tx, px, and kx in Forest change to d, b, and g, respectively, in Reef. Txampay becomes dampay, pxun becomes bun, kxetse becomes getse, etc.