Alien vs. Predator Galaxy recently had the pleasure and honour of sitting down with author Steve Perry to discuss his work adapting the original trilogy of Dark Horse and Mark Verhieden Alien comics into novels for this year’s Alien Day.
While this episode is primarily Alien focused – Steve will be joining us again soon to discuss Alien vs. Predator and Predator – we naturally couldn’t help talking a little about Predator and Steve discussed the origins of the Predator language and the correct way to pronounce Yautja!
“You’re gonna me this so I’m going to tell you now. It’s ya-oot-cha. That’s the way you pronounce it. Where that came from was when she [S.D Perry] started working with me, I gave her a book of Polynesia and Hawaiian language, a dictionary. And we took that and we went through there and picked out words we liked and we would alter them so they all had a certain sound. If you use a foreign language the words tend to sound alike, there’s a flow to it.
So we wanted to use something that was unusual and Hawaain doesn’t have a lot of constanants, it’s a lot of vowels. I couldn’t tell you exactly how we came up with it…she probably did. She was very good at that kind of stuff. She said “this is interesting, it’s a good word” and we looked at it and we thought “we like this.” They have to call themselves something. A lot of people just call themselves The People so that’s what we came up with.”
Be sure to check back in on Friday 26th/Alien Day when we post the full interview with author Steve Perry! If you’re not already, you can subscribe to the Alien vs. Predator Galaxy Podcast on a number of different podcasting platforms including iTunes, PodBean, GooglePlay, Stitcher, Spotify and Amazon Music.
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And hey for Yautja pronunciation purists out there, least he said that ya'll can pronounce it in anyway you wish as he never saw it as that big of a deal, so go ham. It's also funny how despite attempts of finding another literation for the term like Hish, Yautja is too foundational in the Predator lore for anything to be changed that easily. I mean the Hish itself was an attempted and look how that failed.
Yea sounds cooler so I accept.
I know, I just like to upset people.
That name is lame too.
Yautja or hish never sounded good to me and made me cringe, I suppose it make sense that the preds are not gonna call themselves predator or hunters like humans refer to them in many media but idk some stuff is better to not know.
It's hard to hear because the Pred has rough slang
but it could be the word.
Urgh. You're going to make me rewatch scenes from this movie...
Personally I've always pronounced it "yowt-juh" (which is how it sounds in that scene too). I know Steve Perry came up with the name, but this feels like a bit of a "gif is supposed to be pronounced jiff" situation. There's a bit too much emphasis on "OOOOOT!" there for me.
I would actually be interested to see to what extent the studio addresses such situations.
As far as I know, Yautja don't appear in any films. (?)
If the Predator universe is expanded, it could be that they want to introduce the correct name at some point.
Will the studio then say, OK, we have the novels that already have that name in them, so let's just use it, or will something completely new come along and cancel the whole thing, so to speak.
something similar could happen in the Alien universe and that already happened with the prequels
If he is the inventor of the word Yautja, that was a very long time ago and was therefore generally recognized.
As a fan I have to accept it or ignore it.
He wasn't put in charge of anything. They just wrote something they wanted to and it got published.
Disney urgently needs to talk to him
I didn't know that.
I haven't really followed all the secondary literature in the Predator area.
I've always found "yautja" inappropriate because it has a rather funny sound.
The way Mr. Perry tells us how to pronounce it, it sounds like it came from the Jawas.
Well, if he was chosen by Fox to be the leader of Pred culture, he has to think of something.
Yeah it does make sense due to not having mouths and lips like ours. Also never figured of Polynesia and Hawaiian being part of the makeup, how interesting!
"A lot of people just call themselves The People so that's what we came up with." So Yautja essentially means to them what "man" or "human" means to us.