Re: Germans have no /w/, Marking of Resonants, racist use of RL languages in Star Wars movies

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 02:28:11 -0700, Emily Zilch <emily0@...> wrote:

> In fact, I believe one of the languages in question was used in Star
> Wars for the language of the Ewok. I remember learning - to my disgust
> - that they just stole the languages of 'appropriate' "primitives" to
> create a realistic feeling for the movies.
Wrong. Ewok was a Conlang, with its own grammar and lexicon. It was
inspired by bits and pieces of about half a dozen languages, including
Malay and "Chinese" (I don't remember whether it was Mandarin, or
Cantonese, or what). They specifically avoided using a human language, in
case anyone recognised it, but they also specifically needed an actual
language because it would be obvious is Ewoks spoke random gibberish. Not
much of the language exists than is needed for the movie and spin-offs,
and AFAIK the original notes were never made public, but I have seen
websites that reconstruct a fairly complete and plausible description of
the language. Note: There is also at least one site out there that
presents a language called Ewok which is not the language used on the
forest moon of Endor.




Paul