Week 5: Which sounds can sit together

Phonotactics — the rules about which sounds can follow which. Frommer built Na'vi for actors who had to learn it quickly and pronounce it accurately on camera

22 March 2027

Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC, built Na’vi for Avatar under a constraint Tolkien never had: working actors would need to speak it on set, from memory, convincingly, having learned it alongside everything else the production wanted from them. A language the people speaking it cannot pronounce reliably is not usable, however elegant it looks written down.

His solution was not to make it easy. Na’vi includes ejectives — consonants made by closing the glottis and compressing air in the mouth rather than pushing it from the lungs — which do not occur in English and which English speakers find genuinely difficult. What Frommer did instead was make it systematic. The sounds are unfamiliar but the rules governing where they can appear are tight and few, so once an actor has learned the pattern, new words follow it rather than having to be memorised one at a time.

That is phonotactics: not which sounds you have, which you fixed in week two, but which sequences of them your language permits. Every language has these rules, and native speakers apply them without being aware of them. English speakers reject ngip as a possible English word without being able to say why, and blick as a plausible one that merely happens not to exist. You are writing that intuition down explicitly this week, because you have no native speakers to supply it.

Outline#

• phonotactics as the rules about adjacency, and why they feel like instinct
• syllable structure written as a formula, and what each slot may hold
• Frommer’s ejectives, and the difference between hard and unsystematic
• possible words, impossible words, and the accidental gaps in between