Inventors of Dothraki and Kryptonian languages coming to ASU
A still from "Game of Thrones" with Jason Momoa as Dothraki leader Khal Drogo and Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen. The inventors of the Dothraki language will be visiting ASU for a Humanities Week event on Oct. 20.
In 2009, the producers of the HBO show "Game of Thrones" needed to invent a language for the Dothraki — characters on the show who were horse-mounted warriors from the fictional continent of Essos.
Unsure of where to turn, they reached out to the Language Creation Society, a nonprofit, worldwide organization for conlangers — people who create or construct languages.
The society held a competition that was won by David Peterson, one of its cofounders. Peterson was thrilled to get the job but not for a second did he think he had stumbled onto a career.
“In fact, I was quite assured that it wouldn’t be a career,” said Peterson, who received a Bachelor of Arts in English and linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Arts in linguistics from the University of California San Diego. “From the period that I started creating languages in 2000 up until that competition, there were created languages on-screen, and they would hire anybody but language creators.”
Peterson recalled how inventors of a video game called the Jade Empire hired a graduate student in linguistics because he mentioned Klingon on his website.
“It was like they (TV, video game and movie producers) had no idea how to use the internet, that there could be people that actually created languages,” Peterson said.
Then "Game of Thrones" hit the air, and Peterson had the career he never thought was possible.
Peterson and his wife, Jessie, also a professional language creator who received a PhD in linguistics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, will hold a talk titled "Corner of a Circle: The Nonlinear Process of Creating a Linear Language" on Monday, Oct. 20, as part of Humanities Week at Arizona State University. The talk will be followed by a short Q&A session.
“I don’t know anybody else offhand who’s done what David has done, and make this a viable career,” said Tyler Peterson, an assistant professor in the Department of English who received his PhD in linguistics from the University of British Columbia in 2010. “He was one of the first people to take the task seriously of creating a language and doing it based on linguistic principles.”
In addition to the Dothraki language, Peterson invented the Valyrian language of "Game of Thrones," created the Chakobsa language for the films “Dune” and "Dune: Part Two," and he and Jessie recently worked on the Kryptonian language for this summer’s “Superman” movie. Peterson also authored a book on language construction called “The Art of Language Invention,” and the Petersons cohost the YouTube channel LangTime Studio, where they teach others how to construct languages.
All of which leads to an obvious question: How does a linguist invent a language?
For the Dothraki language, Jessie Peterson said her husband began with the existing material, the "Game of Thrones" books written by George R. R. Martin. If there is no existing material, Jessie said, they begin with a blank slate. Either way, their initial goal is to make sure the sound of the language matches the oral vision of the directors and production team.
“We want the sounds in place because until you have what sounds are in the language, any other decisions you make — like grammar, words, overall structure — those kinds of decisions remain theoretical,” Jessie said. “So it’s really important that we get that sound, first and foremost, and that we run it by (producers), because we don’t want to go through the process of creating an entire language and then find out they didn’t like the most basic unit, which was the sound.”
Once the sound is established, David and Jessie begin constructing the language. For “Superman,” they used Superman’s birthplace, the fictional planet Kal-El, and his father’s name, Jor-El, as inspiration.
“If Kal-El is a name, K must be a sound in the language,” Jessie said. “L must be a sound in the language. So, you start picking these elements, saying these sounds need to be something that’s in the language. We used that as a very rudimentary base and then fleshed it out from there to make a full (language) that made sense around that core.”
It is not, Jessie said, a fluid process.
“Actually, that’s one of the areas we want to talk about as ASU,” she said. “Creating language is not as linear as one may hope. You want a ‘Here’s step one, here’s step two, here’s step three,’ but it doesn’t work that way.
“It’s really difficult because it’s like, ‘Well, you need to make a decision about how you want to put syllables together, but now let’s talk about all the other ways that you can end up changing that or breaking this rule and how that plays into how the grammar is actually going to come together.’ So, one decision you make can be informed by eight other decisions that you're kind of simultaneously making. The floodgates open.”
One last thing, in case you’re wondering, the Petersons don’t walk around the house speaking Dothraki or Kryptonian to each other.
“The part we love is sitting down and creating things,” David said. “After we've created them, a lot of times what we end up doing is going through and looking at these words and remembering what it was like when we created them.”
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