Barsoomian is the

constructed language A constructed language (shortened to conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary, instead of having developed natural language, naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devise ...

of the fictional Barsoomians, the sapient

humanoid A humanoid (; from English ''human'' and '' -oid'' "resembling") is a non-human entity with human form or characteristics. By the 20th century, the term came to describe fossils which were morphologically similar, but not identical, to those of ...

inhabitants of Mars in the Barsoom series of novels by

Edgar Rice Burroughs Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950) was an American writer, best known for his prolific output in the adventure, science fiction, and fantasy genres. Best known for creating the characters Tarzan (who appeared in ...

. It was developed from Burroughs' examples and descriptions by

Paul Frommer Paul R. Frommer ( ; born September 17, 1944) is an American communications professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and a linguistics consultant. He is the former Vice President, Special Projects Coordinator, Strategic Planner, ...

for the 2012 film ''

John Carter of Mars John Carter of Mars is a fictional Virginian soldier who acts as the initial protagonist of the Barsoom stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. A veteran of the American Civil War, he is transported to the planet Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabit ...

''; Frommer also created the Na’vi language for ''

Avatar Avatar (, ; ) is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means . It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearance" is sometimes u ...

''. Spoken Barsoomian has mostly

lexical word In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (Abbreviation, abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammar, grammatical propert ...

s, with the equivalent of

grammatical word In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ...

s such as prepositions and pronouns conveyed telepathically. There are few inflections, and word order is fixed to verb–subject–object. Possession is indicated by juxtaposing the object with the possessor, as in Malay. There is a word that makes direct object definite, as in

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

. The vocabulary is relatively simple, with little poetic language.Fredrik Ekman, 2012
An Interview with Paul Frommer
/ref> Some inflection is found in the pronouns. For the object, the initial consonant is suffixed: ''tu'' "I", ''tut'' "me"; ''ki'' "he", ''kik'' "him". To form the plural, the consonants are voiced: ''du'' "we", ''dud'' "us", ''gi'' "they". The effect of the language is staccato. There are ten vowels, five long and five short, transcribed short ''a e i o u'' and long ''aa ey ee oa oo''; diphthongs are ''ao'' (as in ''how'') and ''ay'' (as in ''high''). Consonants are similar to English (b d j g, p t k, v z, f s h, r l, m n, w y), with the addition of the velar fricatives ''ch'' and ''gh'' .Emanuel Levy
John Carter: Inventing New Language
March 3, 2012 Consonants, both voiced and unvoiced, may also be long or short. In the books it is mentioned that Barsoomian is the only language spoken on the entire planet of Barsoom. Therefore, there never are any language barriers between different people from Barsoom, no matter what country or city on the planet they originate from. Written versions of Barsoomian however can differ greatly between different cities.

References

External links

A blog on the original Barsoomian languageBlogs on Frommer Barsoomian
{{Barsoom Constructed languages Fictional alien languages Barsoom Verb–subject–object languages Constructed languages introduced in the 1890s