#Cybertronian language translator movie#

Some clues might be afforded by the Transformers Wiki page on Cybertronian languages, or by Lady Starscream's Cybertronian language theory page, which I've resisted the temptation to study. Just watch, some students are going to take this as a challenge and sneak over one night to plaster the outside of your window with a decal of a giant robot looking in. However, this could just be my assumption based on the Latin alphabet and Chinese. I think the generalization at work in Ransom's comment is interesting: it is my intuition as well that character complexity increases with phonologico-semantic complexity, i.e., logographs will be more geometrically complex than syllabics, which will be more complex than alphabetic symbols.

Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and cultureДoesn't look particularly phonetic, does it.It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

#Cybertronian language translator movie#

I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot. [Update #2 - Cosma Shalizi, in a characteristically astute comment, points us to a review by Charlie Jane Anders, ' Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie', which I can't resist quoting in part:Д¬ritical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. I guess it follows from this, as Michael Cieply tells us in the NYT's Media Decoder column, that 'company executives were privately speculating that the new вЂњTransformersвЂќ film had a shot at becoming ParamountвЂ™s second-highest grossing film, behind 'Titanic''. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Then close your eyes and use your imagination. 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' is a horrible experience of unbearable length If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Perhaps there's a well-defined made-up language behind this text, but if so, I haven't been able to learn anything about it. And the text somehow encodes 'information on the location of a new energon signal', which the evil transformers want to dissect Sam's brain to find. It seems that this ancient Cybertronian text is the movie's MacGuffin - 'the language Sam sees is of the Dynasty of Primes, the original seven Transformers, who powered the AllSpark like a battery by destroying suns', according to Wikipedia. Sam in turn carves some of this text in the turf, as shown here: Whilst packing, he finds another shard of the AllSpark which fills his mind with ancient Cybertronian text.' According to the Wikipedia entry's plot description, 'Sam Witwicky heads off to college in an attempt to live a normal life. This geographical accident is not the only linguistic connection. The trailer suggests that I can expect to get cinematically blown to CGI bits along with pretty much every everything else in the movie. In this screenshot from the trailer, the (added by me) red ellipse marks my dining room window, next to which I generally sit while blogging at breakfast.

Some parts of the movie were shot here at Penn - including one scene in the Quad, where I live: (Warning: clicking on that link will cause Linkin Park to start playing the chorus of New Divide through your computer's sound system, which may not be what you wantвЂ¦) release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.