Re: Atlantean Corpus

Jeffrey Henning sikayal:

> I have some other materials that I will put together on a web site.  I've
> started a page at:
>
> http://www.langmaker.com/atlantean.htm
At this address I found the following paragraph:

"...and what's really amazing is that if you deconstructed Latin, overlaid
it with a little Sumerian, throw in a dash of Thessalanoian, you'd be
getting close to their basic grammatical structure. Or at least in the
same ballpark. Which is almost exactly like certain obscure offshoots of
Chocktaw!  Well, obviously using Creek pronunciation, but you the point,
proving once and for all, that Atlantean trade routes accessed the new
world centuries before the Bronze Age!" - Milo Thatch


Is this an actual quote from the movie?  Because it's complete nonsense,
but beautiful, linguistic nonsense.  I was vaguely offended by it's
absurdity, but then I decided that I'd rather have kids hearing this than
the tachyon-antiparticle gibberish that they'll get in other scifis.

After looking over the dialogues, the only really obvious thing is that
-toap is the vocative marker--but it's not used quite consistently.  In
the first dialogue where Kida cries "Mother!" she says simply "Mah-tihm,"
with no -toap at the end.

Are the transcriptions yours or the directors?  Because there were some
near identical phrases that could be easily explained if you allow for
minor variations in the transcription.

I think that -nick (spelled thus, though I guess it's pronounced [nIk]) is
a 1sg verb ending.  It occurs in "I will kill you for that," and "I have
brought the visitors," the only two 1sg verbs in the corpus.  In the
second phrase it appears as -mick, but it's preceded by another bilabial,
so I think we're dealing with some assimilation.

Otherwise, I'll have to give it a closer look.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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