The Outer Limits: Michael Ansara as Quarlo, a soldier captured in another time

There have been several stories recently (on io9 and The New York Times, for instance) about the linguistic aspects of Avatar, James Cameron's new film that's supposed to completely change the face of movies forever and ever this time we really mean it please just forget about that Tom Hanks Christmas movie from a few years back that Robert Zemeckis directed called The Polar Express that kind of creeped the audience out with the not entirely realistic motion capture animation that'll never be as good as Warner Bros. cartoons or even Johnny Quest thank you.

All James Cameron movies have EX-plosives, but the makers of Avatar are proud of its mere plosives—and it's labials, fricatives, infixes, and other linguistic features.

Propaganda in Starship Troopers: "Do you want to know more?"

Paul Frommer is the linguist that Cameron went to for the construction of a language for the aliens in Avatar, another movie about space marines kicking extraterrestrial ass. (Thank you, Robert A. Heinlein, for creating that subgenre of adolescent wish-fulfillment—though director Paul Verhoeven did make a good film by turning this type of story against itself in his movie version of Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers.)

Cameron seems to going up against the Klingon language from Star Trek in an attempt to tie his film to a natural-sounding alien language.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language by linguist Arika Okrent is a fun and informative account of artificially constructed languages, science-fictional and otherwise.

But one of the most interesting languages ever in a science fiction story was in a teleplay by Harlan Ellison for the 1960s show The Outer Limits. It was entitled “Soldier” and might be the best episode of the series. (Its only competition is from another episode Ellison wrote, “Demon with a Glass Hand.”)

In “Soldier” Michael Ansara plays Quarlo, a soldier from the future. (Ansara also played a Klingon named Kang in an episode of Star Trek, but I don't remember if he spoke any Klingon in that show.)

The Klingon Kang (Michael Ansara) fights Captain Kirk

In Harlan Ellison's story “Soldier,” Michael Ansara plays a soldier who's trying to communicate with people in his past, the 1960s. His language is finally understood by a scientist played by the outstanding character actor Lloyd Nolan.

Lloyd Nolan as Cold War scientist

The scientist realizes that Quarlo is speaking English as it had changed between the Cold War of the twentieth century and Quarlo's war, which the story hints may be just a continuation of the Soviet-American conflict. (Here's the scene on YouTube.)

Not only was this episode of The Outer Limits one of the best science fiction films ever produced, it presented the linguistic phenomenon of language change accurately.

Also, in Quarlo's time, cats are in charge.