A good day to remember the profound care Disney poured into Atlantis.
Let's talk about The Creation of Atlantean. 🌊
To build the world, Disney hired Mark Okrand, the linguist who also created the famous Klingon and Vulcan for the Star Trek series.
Okrand created a fully functional, learnable language. He designed it under the narrative premise that Atlantean was a "root dialect" or a "Tower of Babel" language, the ultimate mother tongue from which all human languages evolved. To achieve this ancient, foundational sound, Okrand primarily utilized Proto-Indo-European roots.
The actual visual characters (the glyphs) were created by comic book artist Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy. Mignola designed the unique script shown on the chart.
In the lore of the film, the language is written in a system called 'boustrophedon', meaning it is read from left to right on the first line, right to left on the second line, and continues alternating back and forth, mimicking the movement of an ox plowing a field.
Happy 25th Anniversary To Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire!