welcome to my webshrine for Predator :)

dictionary

all the words I've got and their meanings, as far as I understand it. see notes below for explainations of my process.

• ndoi = brother
• njorr = father (NOT A NAME)
• njlais = sister
• chish = me, I
• kai = you (casual)
• wol = you (rude)
• dau = you (respectful)
• ngi = no
• eetjley = tool
• hurrun = verb; to be, is
• hurr = same as harrun(?)
• yateis = weakness
• yaupee = runt
• det = so, then, therefore
• jit = fail
• sheks = and
• chogh = strength?
• chitai = to have or possess, perhaps?
• gwo = he (disrespectful)
• sek = vow

to start with, there are a few points when a character says a single word, which gives us an easy 1-to-1 translation. for that we've got "njorr" (the r is rolled, which im representing by doubling it.) which means "father," (I don't know why everyone seems to be treating it like a name, its very clearly just the word "father.") and "naee" (nah-ee, two distinct vowels) which means "no." and also "eetjlay" (same sound as in yautja) which means "tool" and is the word that Dek uses for Thia.
brief aside on that, something I noticed from the scene where they initially meet, the word he uses that the subtitles translate as "use" (tjlay(?)) sounds very similar to the word for tool.
I find that same word when Kwei says "use the cave" during the sparring scene.

anyway, after that I tried to collect the most simple sentences. 2 or 3 words, ideally. a good example of this is Kwei's "chish inu kai," ("you protected me.") (helps that he says it slowly.) I find the sound "chish" and "kai" in a lot of other sentences, and "chish" always shows up when someone is talking about themself, (such as "I'm still alive, brother", "I lost my fang," "I am yautja") and "kai" shows up when Kwei and Dek talk about each other. ("you kept this toy?" "you remember what happened") so lets say chish means "I" and kai means "you." if we look back at that three word sentence, "chish inu kai," which we know is a simple sentence with a subject, object and verb, then we can see that the word order is OVS, the inverse of english. that also lines up with how "kai" has been showing up at the ends of sentences when the subtitles start with "you" and the same for chish and I.

interestingly, the word "kai" disappears once we reach Genna. Dek never seems to use it when talking to Thia. the sentences "you are tool" and "you give up too easily" both end in "wo", so maybe thats another second person pronoun. I wonder if its gender-specific? or maybe honour-based? the sentence "that's not yours" (directed at Tessa) also ends in wo.

UPDATE: I did some reading on various interviews and found that the "you" situation was explained at some point, and i was right, it is honour-based!! "kai" is casual/friendly, for people you're close to (crying...) and "wol" is disrespectful. another one, "dau", is honourific. its the one he uses to address his father in "I greet you with honour." looking back through my logs, he also switches to it for Thia in the end of the movie, starting with the line "I came to rescue you." (crying)

in Dek's little mantras, "grief is weakness." and "sensitivity is weakness," we hear a couple sounds repeated, namely, "harrun" (again, rolled r,) and "yateis" ("yah-tay-us"). we hear "yateis" twice in their father's evil speech, "to forgive weakness is to show weakness," and also in "he is the clan's weakness." so I think it's safe to say it means weakness. we also hear "harrun" in the sentence "this flesh is not sweet." so I think it's a verb that means to be, like "is." its not in EVERY sentence that contains "is," however. (for instance, "name is Dek" just has a short "oo" sound in the middle.) we also hear a shorter, similar sounding word, "harr," in the sentences "Tessa is your sister" and "you are tool."

(also, "harrun" also shows up in the scene when Dek and Thia first meet. the sentence the subtitles translate as "useful... like tool?" is "jleyshwy... itjleyt harrun?" maybe something like "useful... (like a) tool is?")

oh, speaking of sisters! njlais. (n-j-lay-us) found in every sentence where Dek says sister. ndoi is "brother." and as previously established, njorr is "father." I can't really make out Dek's speech in the bonus cliffhanger scene, but I'd be willing to bet that "mother" also starts with an n followed by a constanant.

looking over the confrontation with their father, I was on the lookout for pronouns and discovered something interesting when Kwei and their father were talking about Dek; they're using different pronouns. the sentences "he is a runt" and "he is the clan's weakness" are very simple structurally, allowing us to be certain the word being translated as 'he' in the subtitles is "gwo." meanwhile, Kwei's "he deserves a hunt" and "he will bring home the kalisk" both end in something like "ragh" or "rah."
I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be a matter of respectful/disrespectful pronouns.

I would like to put a transcription of all of the yautja dialogue from badlands here. I have it on a text document on my computer. but formatting it for html is a little bit of a nightmare (do you understand how many p tags and br tags that is??) so it might take me a minute.