It's a little bit unfortunate, actually, that this whole conversation is subtitled in English, as it would be really neat to try to take the audience along with John's thought process in trying to interpret Tars's four-armed gestures! On one of the other hands, however, Tars is successfully able to teach John the Barsoomian word for "jump"-"sak"-through the use of iconic gestures.
Ock ohem ocktei wies barsoom how to#
Early on, however, there is an excellent example of people with different languages attempting to work out how to communicate when Tars Tarkas introduces himself to John, and falls victim to the "gavagai" problem when he misinterprets "Virginia" as being John's name (when in fact John was trying to explain where he is from). All of this, however, is translated for the audience in subtitles, which sets up some subtle dramatic irony and would be more difficult to do in written media. Interestingly, because we don't encounter those words elsewhere, and we know that Therns are not restricted to living on Mars, it's entirely possible that this is not even Barsoomian!Īfter John is transported to Mars, we hear quite a bit of Barsoomian spoken by the Tharks, which John Carter does not understand. The individual words are never translated, as the structure of the phrase is unimportant-all we need to know is that that whole phrase is how you activate the amulet. Upon encountering what he will later learn is called a "Thern" in a cave, John, and the audience, hears our first example of alien language: the command words to activate a transport amulet, "Ock ohem ocktei wies". The details of their conversation are totally irrelevant, serving only to establish that, yes, there are indeed Apaches in the area as had previously been claimed. The audience, however, will not necessarily know that this is a translation convention right away! The first non-English speech we are exposed to it is not Barsoomian at all, but Apache, spoken by John Carter and a group of Apache warriors as John is trying to escape from the US Army. The film opens on Mars ("Barsoom"), employing a translation convention of rendering Barsooming, spoken by humanoid Red Martians, into English. Paul Frommer, previously hired to create the Na'vi language for James Cameron's Avatar, was commissioned to develop a complete Barsoomian language from the fragments of fictional Barsoomian produced by Burroughs. A conlang, on the other hand, is a real language that just happens to be artificially constructed rather than naturally evolved. Side note: a fictional language is a language which only fully exists in fiction it cannot be learned in the real world.
Ock ohem ocktei wies barsoom movie#
However, after Prince Talu succeeded his uncle Salensus Oll as the Jeddak of Okar, he determined to hunt the apt until the species was extinct.After my last post on Disney's Conlangs, I was reminded that there is another Disney movie (not a cartoon, but still a Disney movie) that features a conlang: John Carter (of Mars)(as usual, this and other Amazon links are affiliate links, so I get a cut if you buy the stuff).īarsoomian was originally a fictional language used in Edgar Rice Burroughs (better known as the author of Tarzan)'s Barsoomnovels. The Yellow Martians of Kadabra considered the apt to be a sacred creature, and thus domesticated many of them, using them to guard the entrance to their kingdom, Okar. The Apt inhabit the northern pole of Barsoom, not much is known how they live but the infamous Carrion Caves are infested with Apts.
After a month of this, the apt sleeps for a day, and then begins to hunt again. It chases its prey across the barren snow and ice until its prey tires, and then grabs the prey with its hands and gores it with its tusks. The apt is a fierce predator, able to go for a whole month without sleep. Each eye comprises hundreds of ocelli, each with its own lid, so that the apt can close as many or as few ocelli as it desires. Its two huge eyes extend down the sides of its head from the the center of the cranium all the way down to below the level of the tusks. The head and jaws not unlike those of a hippopotamus, except that the bottom jaw sports two downward-curving tusks. The arms extend from the shoulders and end in white hairless hands.
The lower four are short and are used to convey the beast over the frozen wastes.
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