logicandlanguage.net

Scriptwriters invented the obscure African language of Ku as part of the plot for Nicole Kidman's interpreter who claims to overhear an assassination plot. (Entertainment Northeast)

I suppose one way to understand this is as saying even in the fiction the language is obscure, unlike, say, Tolkien's Quenya, which, according to the fiction, is a major language of Middle Earth. (Hope I'm right about that.)

But it could also be read as saying that a couple of scriptwriters came up with a language for the film and - big surprise this - no major peoples have adopted it, so that (tragically) their language remains obscure.

But that's not the end of the slightly odd things said about this new film. Here's the Guardian's film critic:

Nicole speaks Ku like a native.

(What natives?) And hilariously, he goes on:

Nicole swims like a dolphin in the deep grammar of Ku. And her pronunciation is frankly top drawer.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to track down any text in Ku. I wanted to feed it to the language identifier and then run away.

I haven't seen the film, but I understood the fictional country is intended to be in Southern Africa, perhaps Zimbabwe. If so, is Ku based on chiShona, the language of the majority maShona people? In that case, I wonder if the script-writers adopted the complicated noun-class structure of chiShona -- from memory, 23 distinct noun classes, each with its own prefixes and suffixes. One of them was "long thin objects", such as certain trees and cigarettes. Is it any wonder that Shona-speaking children count in English?

Do linguists have an explanation for why such a complicated grammatical structure evolved?

Boringly, I can imagine someone speaking a fictional language not-like-a-native; hesitantly, or with a blatant American/Australian accent, or something like that. I won't defend "swimming like a dolphin."

Ah, but whilst I can confidently and sensibly claim not to have been born at the geographic center of the universe, it is still the case that a sentence like "X was born at the geographic center of the universe" exhibits a mistake (since the universe has no geographic center.)

Comment nitpick:Matt::Red flag:bull

I will claim this further: not only can I imagine someone speaking a fictional language not-like-a-native; I can imagine someone speaking a fictional language without speaking it not-like-a-native. If classical logic holds here, that person will be speaking the fictional language like-a-native.

I suppose I'm now committed to the idea that in "Nicole speaks Ku like a native" 'a native' is in an intensional context, but I can live with that. Can I live both with that and with the suggestion in the last para that we should be using classical logic? Hmmm.

Here's a suggestion about what is going on. "Like a native" in this context is ambiguous between "like a native speaker speaks Ku" and "like a native speaker speaks their own language." What's required in order for "Nicole speaks Ku like a native" to be true depends on which we mean. If we mean that the way she speaks is like the way natives speakers speak their own language, then all that may be required is fluency, and lack of interference of accent from another language. (This could account for Matt's intuition that the sentence can be true in a fairly straightforward way.) If we mean it is like the way native speakers speak Ku (and I find this is the most natural reading) then she is required to speak in a way similar to the way native speakers of Ku speak. Since their aren't any native speakers of Ku, there is no such way to speak and so the sentence has a false presupposition.

(I think my aikido training is affecting my bull-fighting.)

But, in the fictional context of the film, there are native Ku speakers. I.e., other characters. Nicole speaks the language as well as they do. Hence, in the context of the film, Nicole speaks Ku like a native.

Or, might I daresay, she speaks Ku as if she were one at the crux of the Ku clan. Ahem.