Hollywood's Love Affair With Fictional Languages

For big fans of James Cameron's Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year's sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it's actually been vomrra zìsìt, or "15 years." Rather, the blue-skinned Na'vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron's universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language--painstakingly built from scratch for the movies--uses base-eight counting instead of the human base-10. Fifteen in Na'vi actually means eight plus five (as opposed to 10 plus five in English), making it the equivalent of our 13.