Ridley Scott’s latest film, Prometheus is a prequel to the events of the brilliant science fiction film Alien. If that isn’t enough of a reason for you to go watch it, get this: There is a small sequence in which you can hear a part of Schleicher’s Fable spoken by a cyborg in space!
I was quite delighted to hear it get pronounced in a type of pronunciation which I consider quite likely to be what it sounded like (Laryngeals as velar fricative, *k as a uvular stop), although I would have to rewatch the movie to see if I really agree with the details (probably not).
I really wish I could save you the trouble of going to the movies to hear it, as the movie is somewhat disappointing, but it’s visually fantastic and probably the only chance you’ll ever get to hear Proto-Indo-European in the cinema!
I still have trouble believing that a language could really have the vowel inventory /e o/...
Posted by: Mo | 07/08/2012 at 11:34 PM
Spoiler (I guess): The dialogue between the Engineer and David near the end is also in PIE.
Posted by: Ismenius | 07/15/2012 at 05:35 PM
Mo: Don't we all! I find it becomes a bit less unacceptable if we assume that /i u/ are interpreted as vowel with consonantal qualities instead of the other way around, giving us an /e i o u/ inventory. But well it remains a problem.
Ismenius: I expected the dialogue between the two of them to be PIE, but I couldn't find a clip on the internet (yet) to relisten to it, so I didn't want to go into too much detail. It will be fun to translate that sometime.
Does anyone actually know who helped out with the PIE conversation translation?
Posted by: phoenix | 07/16/2012 at 02:38 PM
Anil Biltoo from the School of oriental and African Studies, University of London did it. He's helped translate the whole thing at Language Log (if you scroll way down the comments).
Posted by: Ismenius | 07/23/2012 at 12:24 AM