So, i you could make languages for Avatar, what sort of languages would you create for that world and how would they differ from place to place?
One of the things I love about Avatar: The Last Airbender (aside from the artwork, the animation, the story telling, the voice acting, the world building, the action, the humor and the heart) is the fact that Aang, in addition to everything else he is, is literally like 110 years old. Having been frozen in ice, it’s not as if he has distant memories about what things were like in his day: He literally remembers it like it was yesterday, because to him it was. Thus, every so often we see Aang reacting to how things are different: towns he remembers that are gone; new cities he doesn’t remember at all; customs that have been abandoned; international relationships that are vastly different, etc. One of my all time favorite episodes is when he goes to school in the Fire Nation. Some historical dissonance highlights:
Aang remembering the actual history which he experienced and correcting the teacher who has a book that says something different.
Introducing what, by now, is an ancient dance to kids who take to it like it’s something brand new.
The setting of the series set the stage for tidbits like this, just as the entire series Avatar: The Last Airbender set up The Legend of Korra for callbacks that only those who watched the previous series (and knew the history) would get (Toph’s personal history and what it wrought; Toph and what became the future of metal bending; the names of Aang’s children; the misdirect where Jenora explores the ancient Dai Li prison under Lake Laogai). This is something you don’t see a lot in television. In America, one of the few universes I know where you can do this is Star Trek, where knowing what happened in various series and movies ends up paying off, as writers for any series or movie often reference the earlier stuff, and that history becomes the history for the universe, not just a particular series.
Both series are so incredibly smart about this that it’s incredible to watch. I’m amazed at how well they’re able to make episodes enjoyable if you know nothing, and even more enjoyable if you know everything. It’s a tough trick to pull off, and it does it flawlessly. The only weak link is language.
As a caveat, Avatar: The Last Airbender started being developed in 2001—the same year that the first of the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and like one year after I’d started creating my first language. In 2015, language creation is very much in the public eye; in 2001, it was not—really not. It’s no wonder that the idea of creating a language or languages for the show never occurred to the creators. It would have been a stroke of luck if it had, and there’s a good chance that if it had, it wouldn’t have ended up in the right hands. So all in all, what we’ve got is probably as good as it gets—which is outstanding.
If I’d been there at the beginning, though, this is what I would have done.
The idea of the mythos seems to be that there was the race of men, and then the spirit world. Unless there’s something in the comics I missed, I think it makes sense to have one proto-language for all humans. I don’t think that makes sense for the real world, but fantasy worlds have their own rules and logic. It makes aesthetic sense to do one proto-language. That proto-language would have been suitably stuffed with all kinds of kooky consonants (that’s how you ensure maximally different daughter languages) and probably would’ve had words with concrete meanings based on the place where humans existed at that time.
(This pixel map comes from DeviantArt user ykansaki. Original post here: http://kelly1412.deviantart.com/art/Pixel-Avatar-Map-66980056.)
My guess would be humans sprung up somewhere in the Earth kingdom and traveled outward after that—possibly with the islands originally being a part of a larger Pangea-like land mass. Also, though I don’t think it was made explicit, the Southern Water Tribe folks can just sail south and get to the Northern Water Tribe, right? The world works like that?
Anyway, starting off with one proto-language, the next step would be to figure out when the humans separated into these four nations, and to figure out if the languages preceded the nations, or vice-versa. Once I figured out when the split occurred (and what the world was like at that time), I could start creating the new proto-languages for each nation.
These four proto-languages would end up being the progenitors for the languages we’d see in Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’d also be the origin point for a lot of names in the series. As for what the languages themselves would be like, I imagined doing the following (based on what it looks like they were going for, vis-à-vis the names in the series):
One isolating language (Proto-Earth).
One polysynthetic language (Proto-Water).
One agglutinative language (Proto-Air).
One inflectional language (Proto-Fire).
The rest would take care of itself. If a particular sound was wanted, that’s easy enough to do with a proto-language that has a rich enough sound system. (When a non-language person says “Make a language like Japanese!” what they mean is “Make a language that sounds to me like Japanese!”; they usually don’t know anything about the grammar.) And for dialects or separate related languages, if you have the proto-language, it’s easy to produce a variant (I imagine we’d see more of these in the Earth Kingdom than anywhere else—aside from two main Southern/Northern Water Tribe variants).
With those set, it would’ve been a fun project to take the Avatar: The Last Airbender languages and fastforward them 70 or so years. It wouldn’t have been a ton of changes, but if you imagine the difference between the way people spoken in 1850 and 1920, that should give you an idea.
As for writing, I think it would have been cool to develop at least three separate writing systems, though more would be even more fun. Realistically, though, if language sprang from one source, then one writing system probably gave birth to the others, even if they look nothing alike in the present. There would definitely be an identifiable writing system for the Fire Nation and a noticeably different one for the Earth Nation, at the very least. Provided we could move away from a glyph-based system like Chinese uses, viewers could actually learn and work with the writing systems to produce their own art, read things on the show, etc. Plus we could’ve done a bunch of different font faces, had the system change in Legend of Korra, etc.
That’s the basic idea. I’m really shaky on the very early history of the Avatar universe, so I’m not sure if the proto-world theory would hold water (were people born on the Lion Turtles…?), but it makes fictional sense. But yeah, something like this, that isn’t (or needn’t be) connected to anything else would have been the ultimate sandbox for a language creator. If done right, it absolutely would have bested Tolkien’s work—easily. But it wasn’t to be. Perhaps in the future there will be another truly compelling, truly unique universe that’s created that will incorporate languages from the get-go. We’ll see! Until then, I think you just kind of have to go with the Chinese, etc. used in the series. It’s fine. :)
P.S.: By the way, given how awesome the shows have been with representation, it also would’ve been incredible for the Aang Gang to meet some Deaf signers who would, of course, have a fictional sign language they used. Also would’ve been cool to see the equivalent of Braille in The Legend of Korra. I’d still love to be able to create a signed language for a show.
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