Alan Boyle has an interesting story of the restoration of a lost Algonquin dialect. I don't know whether or not the movie is any good in general, but I'm always impressed when a director works hard to get it right, even if few people would know the difference.

Good for both of them! (the director and the linguist)

As a Virginian, I was particularly pleased to note that the language research will be turned over to the Virginia tribes and not sit buried (and lost) in some dusty library or film studio closet.

I hope someone had the forethought to tape some of this for a documentary. I'd love to see it, and I'll bet others would too. (Particularly with the 400th anniversary of Jamestown coming up.)

Thanks for posting this, Rand - I would have never come across it otherwise.

That's because you don't read Alan Boyle's blog daily. You should. ;-)

But I link to him about things like this for those who don't.

For some reason, this reminds me of the joke about Virginians, and how many it takes to change a light bulb.

Answer: Ten--one to change the bulb, and nine to stand around talking about what a great bulb the old one was...

Ain't it the truth.... ;-p

Emmerich and Devlin hired linguists for the movie Stargate, too. They took ancient Egyptian and imagined how it would have sounded if given a few millennia to develop in isolation, without writing. Admittedly I couldn't tell you if it sounded like Coptic-without-Greek-lo^anwords or something totally different.

(2nd ed. "lo&an" isn't permitted? May Set bite the author of the spamblocker with the venom of a thousand serpents!)