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Universal language or Translation Convention?
- Do all the elemental nations speak the same language? Katara and Sokka could understand Aang the moment he woke up even though the Air Nomads have been extinct for 100 years. Not to mention when Zuko or Azula and friends were trying to blend in with the people of the Earth Kingdom nobody mentioned something about accents. Plus, everybody uses the same writing system?
- Shakespeare's works are over 400 years old, but they're still quite readable without training. In a literate society, language does not change that quickly.
- Plus also, one big reason language changes is due to the difficulty of travel. Take how you can encounter a completely different accent traveling a mere 30 miles in the UK, but you can go from coast to coast in the US and not notice a major difference. Linguists have hypothesized that with the Internet, English might remain stable for quite some time. Since we know it's possible to traverse to pole-to-pole in a very short time in ATLA's world, this means at least one big factor for the linguistic shift does not exist.
- The four nations have different naming conventions (c.f. Piando catching Sokka as a water tribe member). They ought to all have different accents.
- You could choose to name your child something from an old culture and not have an accent, like how a person born and raised in Chicago might have the last name Fitzpatrick and another person might be named Lowenstein but both speak perfect General American.
- Also, given how much Aang traveled, it's not impossible for him to speak Water Tribe, even if they did have their own language.
- Keep in mind that for a good while, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese all used the same writing system. Since logographic (mostly) don't encode pronunciation, wildly different languages can adopt them without having to change much regarding their looks (like how you can probably read road signs no matter where they are in the world).
What language do they speak, exactly?
- On the one hand, as noted in the Aerith and Bob entry on the main page, the names are mostly Chinese or Japanese, with a bit of out-of-place names here or there. They apparently speak English but they write in Chinese calligraphy. Translation Convention can't be it since Yue was explicitly stated to be named after the [Chinese word for] Moon. And then there's the fact that "Hope" (a typical Western name) is considered unique.
- An English (or any culture) person could name someone Yue and still say she was named for the moon. WMG: The old language of ATLA was Chinese, but it got displaced by English, however, the Chinese writing system stayed. Consider how in Star Wars, the common tongue spoken is English, but it's known as "Galactic Basic" yet written in Aurebesh characters as opposed to Latin characters.
- On this note, why couldn't the writers just give the in-universe common tongue a different name than "English", like what Star Wars does by calling English "Basic"? It's better than having to go into murky details of Translation Convention, and it makes for a better Hand Wave so that the audience doesn't have to wonder why they speak English.
- The writers never gave it a name, but the writers never specified that it was English/Chinese, either.
How the characters' names are written
- The names for all major characters are given in Chinese characters at some point or another, but the transliterations seemed to be semi-arbitrarily picked using the different pronunciations from the different languages that use them? For example, Kyoshi is written as 京士, which is how those characters are pronounced in Japanese, but Iroh is written as 艾洛, which is how they're pronounced in Mandarin (and not Japanese). How does this work?
- The same way Mandarin Chinese works in real life, presumably. For native Chinese names, straightforward. For names from a different language that still use, or have historically used, Chinese characters (eg. Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese), import the characters directly, but pronounce them using the Chinese pronunciation (or they might also import the pronunciation, like what English does). For names from different languages that don't use Chinese characters, transliterate with approximate characters.
Mye? May?
- Is Mai pronounced to rhyme with 'rye' or 'ray'? The whole thing is confusing: It's rendered in Latin as 'Mai' which indicates it should be the former, but the Chinese character used (梅) indicates it should be the latter.
- Maybe it's a dialectal difference. You say tomayto, I say tomahto, that sort of thing.
- "Mei" does mean "beautiful" and "younger sister" in Mandarin (depending on the tone used), so it could be retconned in as a complimentary nickname from Zuko, and a tease from Azula.
- Even Mai's own MOTHER pronounces her name "May". I think its fair to say that's how it's actually pronounced.
- Mostly Avatar uses intuitive Latin transliteration for names. Otherwise, Iroh should be written Ailuo or something.
Momo
- Momo means peach in Japanese, but Japanese probably doesn't even exist in this world.
- They aren't Chinese, they just use some elements from Chinese culture and there are elements from many different cultures in the series. The armor used by the Fire Nation resembles the Ottomans, the Water Tribes are clearly based on groups native to the Arctic and the swamp dwellers aren't even remotely close to Chinese culture. Furthermore, Kyoshi Island is very Japanese, and the Fire Nation has some Japanese elements as well.
- Word of God claims that the joke was completely accidental. They weren't aware that Momo meant Peach in Japanese, they thought it was a funny name for a batlemur and gave it to it. It also means "dumpling" in Tibetan, the language that most of the Air Nomads are named in, so there's that...
Animal terminology
- Why are all the animals named as 'animalnoun1-animalnoun2', especially when a pure 'animalnoun1' or 'animalnoun2' are rare? The real-world equivalent of this would be us calling frogs "lungfish-geckos", or something like that. So how did those names come to be?
- IRL, we have Poodles, Dachshunds, Retrievers, Terriers, etc. that all count as "dogs" because they share common characteristics. So for the people of ATLA, saying 'armadillo-bear' might be like us saying 'Poodle-dog'; presumably, they always specify the latter because there are so many combinations one would not be expected to remember all the names.
- Perhaps non-hybrids used to be more common but were either over-hunted (like the dragons) or were just bred together to get the hybrids for so many generations that they've been displaced.
- Also, note that in The Imprisoned, two of the guards debate whether Appa is a bison or a buffalo. This could be taken to mean they were wondering if Appa is a "(something)-bison" or "(something)-buffalo", but first they're trying to work out the broad category he fits into.
Plan B
- They don't use the Latin alphabet in the Avatar world, yet Aang refers to "plan B" at least once. What the heck?
- Translation Convention. "Plan B" is an idiomatic expression. He's "really" using whatever expression means "backup plan" in their language. Similar to how, for example, we hear characters say "pyrrhic victory" in worlds where Pyrrhus of Epirus didn't exist.
Tof - I mean Toph
- The name Toph doesn't seem to fit with any of the cultures in the series. The "ph" blend is derived from the Greek letter "phi," but we don't see any culture based on a Greek or Western culture, with the possible exception of the Foggy Swamp.
- Just because it's spelled with a 'ph' doesn't mean it's Greek. Take Qin Shi Huang for example - a lot of people think the <Qin> is pronounced 'kin'. An older scheme would spell that Ch'in Shih Huang which is more intuitive, but it's also less nice looking.
