The Language of Life

February 12, 2010 by Dr. Mc.

Dr. Paul R. Frommer may be Professor of Clinical Management Communication at University of Southern California, but that’s not what got him listed in Wikipedia. That took writing the Na’vi language for Avatar. This is no small feat, and writer-director James Cameron wanted it to be real, complete with grammar, syntax, the works. He go it, but it took Frommer five years of commitment to pull it off, from collecting the sounds and grammar rules to some very long days on the set, helping actors pronounce the words.
Just as one need not understand perspective and shadows to know that a picture looks real, so the general public has no clue why the Klingon language in Star Trek or the Na’vi language in Avatar sound so real. It’s because they are real. Someone with knowledge and skill invested major time and effort into inventing them. I’m sure Frommer’s previous data collection from 30 languages was no small part of his preparation to invent Na’vi, which by show time could boast aobut 1000 words.
Yet today many biologists find it difficult to lay aside their “training” and recognize that the language in DNA is no less dynamic and no more likely to occur by accident. DNA is composed of a 20-letter alphabet in a never-repeating series with virtually a never-ending possibility of combinations. Even though this truly random option occurs nowhere else in the universe as we know it, this is not the most amazing part. The really amazing part is that DNA is actually used to carry a language, complete with grammar, syntax, the works. We discovered it because it works. Each sequence comprises a series of commands that are in errantly carried out by molecules and organelles, resulting in the construction of proteins necessary for all functions of a given organism, including the molecules and orangelles that carry out the construction. In the human genome alone the language contains 30,000 words, and the average “word” is 250 letters long. There is only one reasonable explanation for why it seems so much like a real language: because it is real. Language only comes from minds.

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