From the course: Creating a Short Film: 02 Writing

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Inventing new linguistic rules

Inventing new linguistic rules

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 02 Writing

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Inventing new linguistic rules

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As part of the mythology that we created for the film, we also had to figure what this world looked like and what did they wear and what material did they use for clothes or buildings? And because we got that detailed for everything else, we thought it would add to the fantasy element to create all new words and linguistic rules to further distance their world from real life. My biggest inspiration here came from Polynesian languages, like Tongan, Samoan, and Hawaiian. The cultures that speak these languages have a history of living simply and living off of the land, which is how the people in the world of the Assurance live. In many of these Polynesian languages, they'll often have a little apostrophe looking thing called an okina that indicates a glottal stop. A glottal stop is essentially a sudden break in speech in the middle of a word. For example the Samoan phrase for "I'm sorry" is fa'amelie atau. I'm probably pronouncing that terribly, but that's what it is. That break between…

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