Stephen Baxter - The Science of Avatar

They can count. In Dr. Grace Augustine’s images of her time running a school for Na’vi children, we glimpse the Na’vi’s octal arithmetic—that is, a number system using the base eight, derived from their eight fingers, as ours is based on ten.

And the Na’vi know something of their history. Neytiri tells Jake that her “grandfather’s grandfather” became Toruk Macto when the leonopteryx chose him as its rider. This has only happened, says Neytiri, five times since “the time of the First Songs.” Now, her grandfather’s grandfather takes us back four generations, and so “the time of the First Songs,” before all those other Toruk Mactos , must be many generations further back still. The Na’vi don’t have any writing. Is it plausible that a non-literate people could remember events that far back in time?

In fact, on Earth oral traditions can sustain knowledge over many generations. The Trojan War is thought to have happened around 1200 B.C., at the end of the Bronze Age. But Homer, who composed the Odyssey and the Iliad, did not live until around 700 B.C.—twenty generations later, in the Iron Age. Between those dates lay a calamitous interval known as the “Greek Dark Ages,” when the Greeks lost literacy altogether. What seems to have happened is that oral traditions preserved the memory of the Bronze Age wars, in songs and poems, until Homer and his contemporaries and successors wrote down versions of them. Achilles and Hector may not have been real, but scholars today have detected many authentic details of Bronze Age life and warfare in Iron-Age Homer’s words. So non-literate peoples are indeed able to preserve memories across many generations—as long as the story is good enough.

Researchers on Pandora find evidence of a strong oral culture among the Na’vi. Their oral tradition, of songs and story-telling, is thought to go back some eighteen thousand years. Perhaps this is why their basic language is uniform across the planet. Of course the Na’vi have a deep biological connection to that great information store Eywa at their disposal, but personally I like to believe that the Na’vi don’t need Eywa to remember their own heroes.

The music of the Na’vi is another expression of high intellect, and one of the most memorable aspects of the movie. For example, in the scene following the destruction of Hometree and the retreat of the clan to the Tree of Souls, the Omaticaya sing a hymn-like song of loss and imploring, striking and beautiful to our ears. Neytiri associates music with the roots of her culture—“the time of the First Songs”—and the Na’vi appear to use their singing to reinforce their bonds with each other, and with Eywa.

All human cultures seem to make music, though nobody quite knows why, as it’s not as obviously useful as fire-making or cookery. It is used for common purposes, such as in play with infants, and to mark important events like weddings, funerals and religious rites. Musical styles are hugely variant, but it has been shown that listeners can tell whether music from a widely different culture is meant to be happy or sad.

Nobody knows if there are common fundamentals in terms of how we comprehend music. Since the ancient Greek Pythagoras, some theorists have held that notes with simple frequency ratios—like notes an octave apart, made by plucking strings in the ratio of 1:2—are in some sense natural in terms of the evolution of our auditory capabilities, and will appeal to everybody. But there’s much more to music than simple mathematical ratios; even the blues scale features dissonances.

Music is among the most sublime products of our minds. Indeed some have suggested that if we signal to the aliens we should send them, not mathematical codes or history lessons, but Bach fugues. But is it likely that aliens would develop anything like music, or even comprehend ours? Clearly music of our sort works because of the way our bodies and minds process sound. If the Na’vi’s hearing is different from ours (see Chapter 25) then our music would seem distorted to them. And a bat, who “sees” using sound waves, would presumably perceive our music altogether differently—though conceivably an intelligent bat might appreciate its patterns and symmetries, even if it didn’t experience it as we do. Conversely, a species that “heard” electromagnetic radiation rather than acoustic waves could create music that we might see as patterns of light. In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind humans try to communicate with the aliens’ mother ship using a simple musical pattern matched by a light display.

You’ll find in sources like Pandorapedia much more detail on how the film makers intricately constructed Na’vi music. The basis is singing and drumming as in many hunter-gatherer cultures, but it incorporates for example tonal and rhythm structures different from what we’re used to in western culture.

It would be fascinating, if we ever do encounter the alien, to learn if something like music really is a universal feature of intelligence—and even more fascinating to hear alien music, the product of minds quite unlike our own. But to the Na’vi, their music is simply a sublime gift of Eywa.

Another interesting aspect of Na’vi culture is their language, often subtitled onscreen. And it’s a “real” language—or at least, it’s a designed one. Paul Frommer, a linguistics professor from the University of Southern California, devised the language for the movie. The new language has its own sounds, syntax and grammar, with elements borrowed from human languages; Frommer coached the actors who would have to speak it.

Constructing languages has a long tradition. You might make up a language in the hope of easing human communication, as a linguistic experiment, or to support the artistic creation of an imagined world, as in the case of Avatar . The earliest non-natural languages were supposed to be supernatural, such as the “Lingua Ignota” of St. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century. The most famous “auxiliary language,” devised for international communication, is Esperanto, introduced in 1887. Some seven hundred such languages have been created worldwide.

It’s a paradox however that even as we are creating new languages we are letting old ones die out. According to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, humanity today uses over six thousand languages, of which three-quarters are still spoken by just handfuls of indigenous people—and every two weeks a language goes extinct. If we lose language diversity we will lose key insights into the potential for human thought and expression, and we will lose something of our own past too; history can be traced through language evolution.

In fiction, Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars features Barsoomian words, the first of which John Carter has to learn is “Sak!”—“Jump!” The “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s 1984 was intended as a device to restrict human thought. The most famous science-fictional language to date is surely Klingon from Star Trek . There is now a Klingon Language Institute, and at least one parent is said to have tried to raise his son as a “native” Klingon speaker. There is even a version of Hamlet in Klingon—or rather, as any Trek fan would put it, in the original Klingon.

By comparison the Na’vi tongue is very new, with a still-small vocabulary and rules that are gradually emerging. There is however pressure from a global community of enthusiasts for it to develop further. For one thing, a language expresses the culture that originates it, and Na’vi culture is rather more pleasant than Klingon.

The Na’vi’s culture reflects hunter-gatherer lifestyles once found across planet Earth. And given how long the peoples of the Earth were isolated from each other, in the case of the Australians tens of thousands of years, and yet developed similar life ways, perhaps this is plausible; perhaps we are seeing cultural universals in play.