
Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015) - SwingingShips
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/conlang-book/
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pablobaz
An interesting anecdote is when the producers couldn't contact the language
creator and had to make up a line on the spot.

The language creator then back-fitted the made up gibberish into the language.

[http://www.dothraki.com/2012/06/hash-yer-ast-
fin/](http://www.dothraki.com/2012/06/hash-yer-ast-fin/)

~~~
da_chicken
Er, wrong link?

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pablobaz
Thanks - fixed

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lazyjones
I wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced
gibberish for movies. We could preserve languages for posteriority and the
result would be more realistic.

~~~
DanAndersen
By that logic, movies should just use existing props or set designs rather
than creating any new artifacts.

Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.

However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the
desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of
the things that was great about, for example, the _Avatar: The Last Airbender_
cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of
the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it
tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with
pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).

Similarly, the video game _Riven: The Sequel to Myst_ had some cutscenes where
the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a
creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and
much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."

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yumaikas
Can you provide a source for this? I'm very curious, as I grew up speaking Tok
Pisin, and played some Riven, and looking up cutscenes online I can't make
sense of any of the Rivenese (well, the foreign language bits, I don't know if
it's Rivenese or not), at least not in
[https://youtu.be/-rjfyfuijrc](https://youtu.be/-rjfyfuijrc) or
[https://youtu.be/smOzKs1hauM](https://youtu.be/smOzKs1hauM).

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adityapurwa
I am writing a book that also has its own language called Erksar, the language
was once a simple modified caesar crypto where I map vocal with another vocal
(as a software engineer, it was pretty easy to create translator for it). “I
love you” would become “E rufa tu” (it should be “E rufa tui” but I modified
the result and tried to remove unnecessary letter). Now that I lost the
original character map, some new words is not generated via the translator,
but adapted from existing language. E.g “Versila” is adaptation of “Universe”,
it also has this unique words connector to refer to: of, on, in, at, from, to,
the. E.g “vi Avaga vi Posphora” which means “from Avaga to Posphora”, how we
know which one is from and which one is to is the grammar rule. From always
used at the beginning, it is impossible to say “to Posphora from Avaga”
because the grammar rule says so. The language keeps evolving as I continue
writing the book.

~~~
gbrown
As I understand things (not a linguist), that's not actually a different
language than English, though it's a neat exercise. The English language has
undergone all sorts of pronunciation shifts over time, it seems like you've
imposed a new pronunciation map on an existing language, but the grammatical
structure should be preserved.

~~~
adityapurwa
I am not a linguist too, I would really be interested on hearing feedback from
a linguist.

Yes, most words were inspired form existing English words. The caesar
transformation words were mostly transformed from English words, some using
Indonesian, some Arabic, some Latin.

I tried not to create a whole new word, instead the idea of adopting some
words from existing language were a common practice on any language that we
have now, so I tried to adopt whenever possible and change the pronounciation.

Here's an example of some words that was not adopted from an existing language
(or if there was similarities, it wasn't my intention): \- Vragel (soul) \-
Serentia (eternal) \- Rus, Erus, Berus (the suffix used to implicate
negativity, rus is least negative, erus is mid, berus is the most negative;
e.g Vragelberus (to indicate a highly damaged, wicked, dangerous, or corrupted
soul).

There's also some rule I used to create/adapt words, words that indicates
greatness or something big always ends with the letter "A". E.g. Versila
(universe), Elia (god), Alua (sky), Titania (giants), Manara (tower).

Name of places in the book also follows this rule. E.g Riddorana (place of
huge waterfall), Zodiarchia (capital city), Altand (small ponds, note it
doesn't end with an "A").

This rule allowed me to write poets that easily ended with the letter "A".

It is always interesting to learn words from existing language, then adopt it
and learn how to make it fit with the existing language design.

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wool_gather
For another famous conlang, there's a cool video where Mark Okrand discusses
the process of inventing Klingon: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Did-
eVQDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Did-eVQDc)

(He also briefly talks about the Vulcan language at the beginning.) What's
interesting here is that he was brought in for the third Star Trek movie. But
there was already a small amount of spoken Klingon in the first movie, created
by James Doohan. So Okrand, while he was tasked with actually inventing the
language, felt constrained by continuity. He discusses trying to rationalize
the preexisting bits and then extend the language coherently.

(And his enthusiasm is really clear. It's fun to listen to someone smart talk
about something they're really excited by.)

~~~
DanAndersen
The question of continuity is an interesting one. There was a similar issue
for the recent Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, where some of Tolkien's
languages are very fragmentary but there was a desire to have more invented
speech.

David Salo is a Tolkien scholar who was brought onto the film team to help
expand some of Tolkien's conlangs for use in the film. While his work isn't
strictly "canonical," he did do a lot of serious work to make his additions
fit into what fragments we have. His blog is a good read:
[https://midgardsmal.com/](https://midgardsmal.com/)

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ggambetta
I guess this partially explains why making a movie or TV episode can cost
millions / hundreds of millions of dollars :-/

Yes, Dothraki being an actual language is probably "better" than Leia speaking
gibberish to Jabba, but to me it feels like it's _way_ past the point of
diminishing returns.

~~~
ghaff
See also the articles about the level of detail in the costumes in Game of
Thrones.

There is a _lot_ of attention to detail, probably including a fair bit that
doesn't make it on camera, in big budget video/film productions. You could
probably cut a lot of it and still have a "pretty good" final product. But
being obsessive about detail rather than being content with good enough in all
sorts of aspects of production, including the acting, is one of the things
that separate competent shows from really good ones.

~~~
ggambetta
I get that. But spending a lot of money on things that don't make it to the
final cut always felt like a waste to me. I'm very _very_ marginally into
filmmaking (see bio), and I've always had the impression that costs and time
could be cut drastically just with better planning.

I often wonder what would happen if you applied startup principles to making a
movie. Thinking in terms of MVP, customer value, efficiency, on top of the
artistic vision. This is not just talk, I'm putting my ideas to practice by
producing _two_ zero-budget feature films with an extremely lean mentality.
Let's see how they turn out :)

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de_watcher
Reminds me of "The Matrix" with detailed sketches of how exactly should it
look.

~~~
laumars
That's called a story board. As far as I'm aware all movies and a fair few TV
shows do this because it's cheaper to sketch your idea out before you hire
expensive camera crew, lighting, etc

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durzagott
If you're ever interested in doing this yourself, I recommend /r/Conlangs at
Reddit[1]. Lots of good tips with a friendly community.

1: [[https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/)]

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princeb
I don't read a lot of books with invented languages, but a number that I've
seen seem somewhat European. I don't remember very many Sinitic constructed
languages. I think that would be nice, but the nature of the language conveys
information about the culture and the society that speaks it. a reader would
naturally see a Sinitic language and picture a culture that is Sinitic, even
if the author did not intend it that way. so the style of the constructed
language is restricted to history as it has evolved in our world, and not the
fictional world the author builds.

to push even further, how would one imagine an alien language where the
organisms do not speak through mouth-like organs? what if they made noises
through all their pores in their skin? or non-auditory communication like
colour coded messages in their eyes? what if aliens had no mouth or eyes in
the first place? or skin? what if aliens spoke in methods that did not require
passage of time... i.e. the entire message flash out in a single packet of
information? I guess these methods of communication wouldn't allow a story to
be told in a way that is familiar to typical human story telling and would
thus be uninteresting. but would be nice to imagine regardless.

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jimbokun
"to push even further, how would one imagine an alien language where the
organisms do not speak through mouth-like organs?"

That's the basic plot of Arrival.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/)

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skrause
There is also a 2 hour long podcast interview with this guy:
[http://omegataupodcast.net/276-linguistics-conlangers-and-
ga...](http://omegataupodcast.net/276-linguistics-conlangers-and-game-of-
thrones-dothraki/)

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bloopernova
See Also: The Expanse's Lang Belta, or "Belter Creole"

Created for the book by Nick Farmer with the authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty
Franck, he then coached the actors and extended the language for the TV show.

Here's something from wired on that creation process:
[https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-expanse-belter-
language/](https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-expanse-belter-language/)

This is also fun, Belter Creole words and their origins:
[http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books)](http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_\(Books\))

pretty cool, sa-sa ke?

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sriku
I've found Mark Rosenfelder's books "the language construction kit" and "the
advanced LCK" fascinating to see how much thought needs to go into a language.
I felt I learnt more about existing languages from those books than actual
language books. He deals with everything - from syntax to phonology to script.
LoTR was the book that drew me to conlangs in the first place though.

The community is also fascinating, with folks spending passionate decades on
making languages - ex: ithkuil.

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classichasclass
I always theorised there was some extra-auditory or human-inaudible cues in
Ubese (Boushh) that filled in the gaps. After all, the only individuals
responding directly were non-human: Jabba (who probably could understand, but
choose to use C-3PO for egomaniacal and/or ceremonial reasons) and of course
old Goldenrod himself.

Hey, my linguistics degree had to be good for something.

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dschuetz
The article is not about How To Invent a Language, but rather about the book
that guy wrote.

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netgusto
An analysis about the Star Wars Ubese language :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bnBqXQ1DE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bnBqXQ1DE8)

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leeoniya
another great read abouth Ikthuil:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-
be...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners)

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max_
Thanks for posting

