This is fantastic. I'm very excited! If enough of this is finished to form a story with a reasonable conclusion, what if I draw it as a webcomic?
ERB's novel series, generically known as "John Carter on Mars", is well-known.
Here's the Wikipedia entry listing all the novels, their pub. dates, and with articles describing most of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Burroughs#Barsoom_series The article on "A Princess of Mars" shows the original cover art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Princess_of_MarsI prefer the cover art from a 1963 Ballantine edition by Gino d'Achille, I'll insert a jpg at the end of this note.
As for you doing a comic version -- hey, the books are out of copyright. Get the text from project gutenberg and have at it! Or if you would rather work from my screenplay (which has a tighter dramatic structure) wait a few weeks.
By the way, I haven't read Burroughs, but didn't he include any samples of Barsoomian or even any individual words?
ERB invented maybe 150 Barsoomian words, mostly nouns, place names, and character names. However he never attempted any syntax or extensive language development -- nothing like Tolkien's languages. He never tries to reproduce complete lines of dialog in Barsoomian. Carter gets by on sign language for a few chapters. Then, motivated by a desire to talk to Dejah Thoris, he studies hard and "within a few more days I had mastered the Martian tongue sufficiently... to carry on a passable conversation." And from then on, everyone speaks English.
That works in a novel but in a screenplay we have to show, not tell. If a character uses sign language, that has to be spelled out in the script, and so do the reactions to it. If characters talk in an alien language, we have to hear them -- which means all the words have to be composed and written down, and actors have to speak them (confidently).
Initially I culled all the Barsoomian from all the books into a file and wrote a little Python program that analyzed ERB's letter frequencies and then generated random words with the same letter distribution. I was going to cobble these up to make a jargon that would sound like the novels.
But this was just too difficult! Hard as I find it to get it right, it's still easier to translate into Lojban. And better for other reasons, esp. giving actors confidence that they aren't just spouting gibberish but "real" words.
Dave Cortesi