Stargate (was: Egyptian based Conlangs)

taliesin the storyteller wrote:
>=20
> On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>=20
> >Somebody on this list talked about Stargate, the movie. It happens=20
> >that the language spoken on the planet of Ra is a real conlang. It
> >was a command to a linguist to make a possible evolution of=20
> >Egyptian after millenia. But I don't know any webpage explaining=20
> >the structure of this conlang.
>=20
> Sadly, this is the best I've found...
> http://www.mgmua.com/STARGATE/HTML/PNotes.Language.html
>=20
> If one were to contact the author/inventor of the lang,
> though...
The author is Stuart Jason Smith, PhD in Archaelogy, UCLA, and
he seems to be an expert in Egyptian matters. I have found
his personnal web page, where he discusses some features of
the language. There are also some pictures of him with the
actors.
    http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ioa/people/smith.html

As a matter of fact, he pretends that the language is actually
ancient Egyptian, and that he only devised a pronunciation for
it:

 "Recently I worked as a consultant on the hit Science Fiction epic
  movie Stargate. I reconstructed spoken ancient Egyptian for the=20
  production (modern Egyptians speak Arabic), translating dialog and
  coaching the actors, including James Spader and Jaye Davidson.
  Although the work was a bit esoteric, the stars appreciated the fact=20
  that they were actually speaking a real language instead of made up
  nonsense words. As a result, about half the movie's dialog is in=20
  ancient Egyptian. The main conceit of the film, that Spader does=20
  not recognize the language initially and yet is able to pick it up
  quicly later on, worked well, since Egyptologists ignore =20
  pronunciation. For example, when Spader names the god 'Ra,' as any
  good Egyptologist would, the village elder just gives him a blank
  look. The orginal pronunciation was 'R=ED-'uw.'"=20

So perhaps this is not really what we would call a 'conlang'...

Didier.
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