Talk:Atlantean language

Previous discussions without headers
In the Unmentioned Verb Tense of Atlantean section, Noclevername marked as "needs citation" a passage that references original research and new ideas from yours truely. How can I site myself? I've tried to provide a brief remedy to the situation.

I plan to come back to this article to polish it up, at least in terms of my ideas that I put down here.

-Epigraphist Epigraphist 16:37, 29 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I hate to do this to you, since you've obviously put a lot of work into this article, but parts of it are in direct contradiction to Wikipedia's no original research policy. Although I'm sure that your speculation is plausible, the rules say cited sources only. Sorry. Noclevername 21:10, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh, no. That's cool. I understand. Rules and regulations are important. Please do make sure that this article conforms to the standards of this fine website. Besides, I can always find a more appropriate place to present the findings of myself and all my fellow workers in the decipherment of Atlantean.

Epigraphist 02:26, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

What is it, exactly, is it that you are doing?

Epigraphist 02:28, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

There was actually quite a bit of original research here when I first visited this article. For example, I've found no evidence online that anyone officially stated the sentence order is SOV. Okrand only says in the Unofficial Disney Animation Archives' press release that the verb goes last. Everything else, like post-positions, noun-adjective, adverb-verb, and even the pronoun names, stuff that I had to work with when I began, was all here and here alone. The bibliography to this dictionary and grammar I've made is something like 15 pages. I've combed multiple Google searches with a fine-toothed comb. There's a lot out there on this language from interviews and newspaper articles presumably based on press releases.

Yeah, it's alright by me if you delete what you find to be unsupported. You'd be a regular Bishop Diego de Landa, but I always liked that guy. He's sort of a hero of mine in a paradoxical sort of way.

Epigraphist 02:50, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for being so cool about it. I'm used to getting chewed out on talk pages! ;) I'll make the necessary cuts. --Noclevername 04:29, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome! :D It must be a grace from Almighty God, Deus Omnipotensus! Yes, the policy and everything makes perfect sense. Thank-you for your efforts toward directing the Atlantean language fan commnunity. We tred where angels dare not by researching a copyrighted language. Indeed, there are many other places where Atlantean language fans can go to exchange insights and theories on it. I hope to come back to this page and subtract from it further anything I find to be both undocumented and novel. I will include your contribution in a favorable light in my book. MOAKH NEE-sh-tem KAH-gihn net PAH-gesh-leh-nen! "I thank you now from the bottom of my heart." If you ever want any theories on Atlantean, drop me a line! That goes for anyone.

Epigraphist 00:38, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

IPA symbols
I would suggest using IPA symbols for this article, perhaps in place of, or alongside the pre-existing pronunciations. Only because they are more specific and more easily understood by speakers of different languages. It would be great if someone with extensive knowledge of the IPA could provide the pronunciations, granting they first look at the ones already in place, and draw some sort of educated guess from there. -- ...Wiki wøw  22:38, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Howdy, tokh, I'm one of the people who might answer for your request. There's probably others out there, but I've done a lot of work in the recent months with Atlantean.

If anyone new wants to join the community of Atlantean language discipherers in response to this request by Wikiwow, I can help. Contact me at ljrogers(at)mtu.edu. I have contacts, old notes, publications, and other resources.

I have very little phonetic training. However, my fellow Atlantean discipherer Cynthia Morris seems to have had some. I plan to contact her and review her December 12th publication. She is not the only one who has done work on the phonetics of Atlantean. Paul Sherrill and his Atlantean Language Group had sealed a case for one phonetic system long before I stopped using the Atlantean alphabet as a cipher. (Message string "Spelling")

I am familiar with IPA from a college course I took on the English language. Through it I have connections with a Harvard-trained linguist, one Victoria Bergvall, Ph.D. I have met with her about this language and plan to do so in the future.

Nonetheless, a serious obstacle is in the way for me to post the fruit of such research on the Wikipedia ("yutenosag dungun kwahm", "conversation without speech"). As hinted at above, Marc Okrand, the language's creator, has published very little of the Atlantean language through Disney. Hence, among many other elements of a complete language, there is no published pronunciation system for Atlantean. All work thus far (that I know of) is fan-researched.

The Esteemed NoCleverName did us Ugnaughts of Atlantean a great favor in making us aware of Wikipedia's "No Research Policy". Is your understanding of this policy the same as his? Should we put on Wikipedia a pronunciation scheme? Please write back. I earnestly look forward to your reply regarding these matters.

Lawrence Rogers, Epigraphist 05:20, 27 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I am aware of the "No Original Research Policy", and that it discourages statements based on one's own interpretation of the subject, including fan research. However, I'm a firm believer in the "there are always exceptions" concept, and in the case of television, film, literature, et cetera, fans are really the first source of information regarding plot and technical details. And as you said, there is very little published material regarding the Atlantean language. If you can get someone with advanced training in the field of phonetics, it would be of great use to this article.


 * I know nothing of Atlantean, and very little of the International Phonetics System, so I don't know how I could really help, but I think this article could really use some standardized phonetics, seeing as they are in place in all the natural language and a number of well-known artificial language articles, for the purpose I have stated in the first post. Any published work concerning Atlantean phonetics would comply with Wikipedia's verifiablity policy, I imagine. However, the pronunciations are already in place, and as I have stated, fan research to some degree is acceptable in this case. And the only work to be done is applying the IPA symbols (which shouldn't be too difficult, I imagine). I hope I answered your questions. -- ...Wiki  wøw  02:23, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Good job, Robors, getting the Atlantean alphabet in there!

Here are the letters that I've found Atlantean actually uses:

A B G D E W H I Y K L U M N O P R S SH T

I gave it an abecedary based mostly on the earliest one out of Ugarit. The only curveball is that the H or "Heth" character is used for the "kh" sound of the Illustrated Script. That's the German gutteral consonant of "ach" und "doch", usw. I think Okrand put it in there because it's a common world language sound and it slightly connects Atlantean to Ancient Hebrew. All the other letters are rough equivalents to English'. Vowels are basically Latin.

Wikiwowtop: Give me a month or so to think about all this and return to the article.

Epigraphist 19:01, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm still stalling on overhauling this article and getting Vicky's help with the IPA. Right now I'm very busy and soon I'll be away from the internet for a long while. Perhaps in 3 weeks and certainly after June 24th I'll be able to make the aforementioned contributions.

DEEG-tem AHD-luhn-tih-suhg net GEH-soo-nohs-tem DEH-moh-tuss-ess bet NAHL-tem WAH-nuht-leh-kik. TAH-ges DEEG-tem net GEH-soo-eh NAHL-tem behr-NOAT-goh-mick. BEH-ket-yoakh, PREE-dihn kwahm KOO-peg-yoakh. PAH-geh-sheh-nekh. (KOO-doh-bih-rihn GAH-mohs-eh BOAG-leh-nekh! YAHD-loog-yoakh!) - KEH-ruhn-tem SHAD-luhg suhl-DOO-peh-toat, Leb EH-seh-kick.

Epigraphist 13:24, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Excellent job, Paul Sherrill/Masily box! Even though I've been too busy to see to changing this article myself, I will change it in the future. I would also like to talk with you, patriarch of Atlantean discipherment! Let's discuss these changes and swap info!

Epigraphist 00:33, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

In the "Chart of Atlantean vowels", column "Example in IPA" seems to have the stress marks wrong. I don't speak Atlantean, but if wesɛr was stressed on the second syllable wouldn't it have to be wɛser? The convention in IPA is to place the stress mark before the stressed syllable, not after. --88.73.138.65 (talk) 16:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Atlantean Language Institute article deleted speedily
I tried to give the Institute its own article, using the KLI as my template. It was deleted by the authorities.

Epigraphist 03:53, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Note on Grammar and Hope of Update
This article needs revision quite badly, but it's going to be perhaps another 6 months or more. For now, inquisitive parties should visit the Yahoo Tech Group "The Atlantean Language Group", itself in need of updating.

Atlantean is an SOV language with a strict word order.

There's very little by way of phonological processes and it only occurs (in orthography) between the suffixes on the verbs.

Nouns are inflected with suffixes for Case then Number. There are Nominative(-), Oblique(-tem) (for objects and postpositional objects), Genitive(-ag), Instrumental(-esh), and Vocative Cases(-top) (5) for nouns and Nominative(-), Accusative(-it), Dative(-ib), and Genitive(-in) (4) for pronouns. There are also suffixes which come before Case which indicate other things about the noun (-mok means "big"). There are actually no nouns which are indeclinable, just situations in which declension is deemed semantically unnecessary. There may be another Case marked with both Inst. and Obl. suffixes (like Sumerian), but I doubt it. - Verbs are inflected for Tense/Mood/Aspect and then Person/Number. Moods are: "Normal" (about 12 variations) and Imperative (-/-yoh). There may be a Perfect and Imperfect set, it's really hard to tell. Tenses are Past, Present, Future. There's at least one variation in aspect which put the action slightly earlier in the day. Persons are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd and numbers are Singular and Plural (no Dual).

A big area of uncertainty to me is how many different Tense/Mood/Aspect markers are in Atlantean. I stand by my number of about 10. Repeated visits and discoveries of new texts since December 2006 have led me to this.

Genitives follow their nouns unless forming a compound. Cases occur in this order in sentences, always: Instrumental Nominative Dative Accusative. Postpositions.

Questions are formed with intonation and 1 of 3 question particles at the very end. No wh-movement.

The syntax for longer sentence formation is funny. It's perhaps non-Indo-European and possibly based on some Native American language(s) available to Okrand (Californian?). It involves two related sentences connected with a connector word.

Words are mostly based on Proto-Indo-European roots mixed with Indo-European synonyms, sometimes cross-referenced with other ancient languages (like Classical Hebrew). There's also words from (some) Chinese, Phonecian, Middle Egyptian, and various Native American languages, along with a few others, most of which I've encountered and verified. It's very creative but hard to re-create which makes diciphering new texts without a translation a real bear.

As a last note: For what it's worth, I'd like to note that the Wikipedia entry for this language is more comprehensive for that of Klamath-Modoc. Yet I don't regret at all my time spent on Atlantean. As it's based on real languages (but even if it wasn't), it's helped me in all the other languages and linguistic phenomenon which I have studied since December 2006 -emmensely. I wouldn't be where I am today if not for Okrand's made-up language.

-The "Epigraphist", from a remote source 35.9.174.13 (talk) 02:30, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Update of this Page
Today I'm going to begin updating this page.

Epigraphist (talk) 00:22, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Relax, Please
Before someone gives you a Barnstar for your diligence: This is a work in progress. I hope to have all these issues with citations in a week to a month. I'm afraid I don't have the liberty of time to work on this project that you have for criticizing and tearing down someone else's hard work.

Epigraphist (talk) 10:14, 13 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I am doing no such thing, and I'm using templates so if you think it took me a long time to tag that you're going to need to read up on how Wikipedia works. You seem a little too vested in this article. It is not *your* page. - Ageekgal (talk) 10:24, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Corpus
Thanks for all help! (Dosepentem tirid bet pageshenen!) Check out the "Klingon language" article's section on "Canon". Also see "Phrygian". "Canon" or "Corpus" are important concepts in corpus-based linguistics.

Epigraphist (talk) 05:49, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

More Coming
Give me a week and the other sources will be cited. Eventually I'll even be able to switch to a less bulky and inefficient citation format. Thanks to all again for their help.

Epigraphist (talk) 04:01, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

The Movie
Couldn't this page site a little more referance to the points in the movie where the language is spoken? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.79.185.75 (talk) 18:26, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

This and Other Issues
Check out the external link "Contains full corpus without language explanation." It gives the corpus (including the movie and other works). Maybe I'll edit the article in the next year to make more clear the text from the movie. However, if I did, it might go the way of all other information relevant to this conlang and get deleted as "original research".

Can people just leave some stuff up for a few years? I'm a busy academic (in-training). Citing this stuff takes time and involves me carting around a lot of books. We don't all have laptop-style internet access.

Epigraphist (talk) 15:53, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Note to Readers
On 06:54, 5 October 2008 user OttoTheFish deleted massive sections of this article without any discussion here on the talk page. Wikipedia apparently doesn't want people to know how Atlantean works. It gives users no deadline for changes then makes permanent deletions. Users who want to make a positive contribution often have to fight to keep their work online. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit is severely flawed because anyone includes people who just don't know what they're doing. I recommend no one contribute financially to the upkeep of this farce.

Link to see those changes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlantean_language&diff=243121162&oldid=243094719

I would have eventually given citation for those sections but now I realize that I should direct my energy for Atlantean on the book I'm going to publish and on the language's unofficial Yahoo group. Interested people will find it. Contributing to Wikipedia is an inefficient use of energy. Its users and directors chase away real talent on a regular basis. Read abandoned profiles.

Epigraphist (talk) 16:18, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Why deleted?
I had this link in the External Links section which I thought was very relevant to the topic in question and even supplied many of the sources this article makes reference to. It's a mailing list that has the best of dicipherment efforts past and present archived and on-going on it. Why is this not Wikipedia material? When people type "Atlantean language" in Google, they get this article on top. Why not include this link? It's also the biggest resource on the Internet for the language. Maybe not that many people care about the language, but still...

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/atlantean_language/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 35.8.131.163 (talk) 03:42, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Because we don't link to Facebook pages, blogs, forums, Yahoo! groups, and the like, as they are not reliable sources. Read WP:EL. -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  17:35, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Adjectives
I've been researching the corpus for a while now, and I've found two examples of adjectives: "keylob.tem ta.mil", Royal Chamber, and "denet.en.tem gon.os.mig", giant trees. They share similar endings that start with "mi". Judging from how they change at the coda, adjectives may agree with their nouns. Taking into account the fact that Atlantean wasn't designed to be overly complex, I think that the "mil" simply reflects the singular and not the obliqueness of its noun, and that "mig" reflects the plural. Does anyone have clearer ideas? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kloiten (talk • contribs) 04:10, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Please keep this topic on the page as a reference: For the future, people with these kinds of issues would do best to join and comment on the Atlantean Language Group, the place where the few people interested in this thing meet, eventually. I'm going to post your question there.

Blissglyphs (talk) 20:08, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

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