How to Create a Language: Dothraki Inventor Explains | WIRED

my name is David Peterson and I'm the language creator from HBO's Game of Thrones this is my process for creating a language very first thing you need to do is figure out why you're doing it who's going to be using the language is it going to be human beings because if it's not going to be human beings then you have to talk about you know different vocal apparatus in other words is this gonna be a language that's spoken or is it going to be a language that's signed you go and see oh actually by the way the people that are gonna be using this language are these aliens and they have one big eyeball they don't have a mouth they don't have any ears and they have a bunch of tentacles it's an entirely different process like what can they do well they can see so it's probably going to be a visual language what can they use they've got their tentacles so they can use their tentacles to make a sign language that's kind of like the process you need to go through at the very very beginning after figuring out whether your language is going to be only spoken or spoken and written then you can move on to sounds the sounds that exist in the various languages that we speak are ordered consonants are separated into their manner that is how they're produced and then the place in the mouth where they are produced so you can create like a little table let's do Dothraki right now that's easy stops fricatives nasals and talks myths which is a catch-all term for like basically everything else and then what comes next is the place of articulation where you pronounce this stuff in your mouth so there's labial sounds coronal that's when your tongue tip touches either your teeth or the bump behind your teeth there's velar uvular glottal and you can fill out the rest of the sounds so starting with the lips Authority doesn't have any stops it does have F and V nasals M what that means is that you're doing something in here but the air is actually passing through your nose yet though Finley and Finley's for approximate it almost makes contact but doesn't quite so it's not you know but it's Wow T and D s and z and Dothraki you also have this sound and then for approximate so we kind of got these guys and this one that looks like a regular R that's a nice trill I have no tricks for helping you pronounce that you just gotta practice it I feel bad about that one but the idea is that you fill out this chart and what you notice is that things are occurring in groups the idea is that you don't want to have too many sounds but you have enough so that words can sound different enough without having to get too long I would then do a different map for vowels but it kind of works the same they're either front or central or back and that's where your entire tongue body is the front valves are things like e the back valves are things like ah and the central vowel sound really really like when you're making your syllable shape this is part of how you give your language a character deciding exactly how the syllables are going to shape up what consonant clusters you're going to allow or not allow in Dothraki there are plenty of consonants including the consonants W and Q how we I think it actually means bile when you turn this into the object of a sentence the usual thing that you do is you drop this vowel but you cannot endure a key and a word with these two consonants it's simply impossible so you insert a dummy eval just so that it's pronounceable and that's part of what shapes the character of Dothraki you know that you're never ever ever going to see a word that ends in either of these sounds it just can never happen syllables are so important because you're trying to give the language a sound if it could be that any word could fit into the language then what does it sound like it sounds like anything if you're creating a language for a show that's what you want them to get the sense of that they can actually hear a word and say no that doesn't that sound like a dothraki word order me may throw that one sounds weird you want them to be able to say that even if they don't know why or how when it comes to stress and intonation and also tone you have to decide alright is this Lee was gonna be a stress language or is it gonna be at own language so English is a stress language that is we have stresses placed in various places hello other languages like Hausa or Mandarin are tone languages that is the actual pitch that you speak the the Vallot is important we saw I've done both I do syllable mostly because I am not convinced that actors will pull off a tone language correctly when you're designing a stress language there are rules to where certain things are stressed so for something like Dothraki it subverts the expectations I guess of English speakers this word obviously English speakers are gonna look at that and say well Dothraki yeah simple enough in Dothraki that word that syllable is stress so it's Dothraki Dothraki to be honest the stress rules are pretty easy once you get used to them so I just remember eyes them next is grammar and grammar is something that we can refer to as morphology that's how words relate to one another and set themselves into paradigms every single language on the planet that we know of makes a distinction between nouns and verbs basically having nouns versus verbs as far as we know is the most important distinction in language when you're creating nouns the thing that you have to decide is what is going to happen with these nouns do I want to have singular and plural do I want to have a dual or a trial number exactly two or three or something do I want to have nothing do I want to have case and if so which cases how many the last thing is gender the gender just refers to what type the noun is that can be masculine and feminine but it could also be big versus large living versus nonliving natural versus non natural tool versus plant that's something that you can decide as you're building the language in high Valyrian nouns have four numbers 8 cases and 4 genders so you have to know a lot of stuff to be able to use a noun in high valyrian but you don't have to use a whole bunch of extra words like little prepositions and stuff it means you have to use fewer words and your sentences can be shorter that's how it works verbs are the most important part of any language and it's also the part that I hate creating the most the verb is the engine of the entire grammar they can have tense they can change depending on who the subject is or who the object is or who the indirect object is there are also other parts of speech that some languages will have there are adjectives adverbs can come in three different types there's manner adverbs time adverbs place adverbs there's also prepositions plenty of languages have little bits that come afterwards that are just like prepositions and they're called postpositions japanese has postpositions so as high valyrian determiners are little words that give you a more specificity about the now demonstratives give you a little bit more local information in Dothraki there's actually three different ones there's this close to you there's that close to the person you're talking to and then there's that way over there that's close to nobody nouns verbs and all of those extra parts all of that together is what comprises the grammar when it comes to sentence structure the first thing that you have to do is figure out what the order of the major elements in your sentence is going to be for example the sentence the man sees the woman it's the subject first then the verb sees and then the object is the woman so the man sees the woman in high valyrian sal it'll different you start with the subject again voila that's the man and then you put the object already okay and that's the woman and then finally the verb or Venus sees its subject-object-verb after you decide on your basic word order four basic sentences then you have to move on to other types of sentences for example questions so voila pretty old Ernest is the man sees the woman but if you want to turn that into a question Valar Briones does the man see the woman you don't actually change the word order you don't add at another word in high Valyrian you just change the intonation when you're creating the language this is your way to demonstrate exactly how your language works differently from English it's really cool to come up with a really cool and like fun and interesting and quirky grammar but if every single thing is just word for word exactly as English is right in a row then you haven't really done anything very interesting the next step would be derivation we have for example the verb teach and we have teacher one obviously came after the other that is what's known as derivation and you can do that with your language as well and it's probably a good idea to give you an example in high Valyrian there is a word jade meal the enemy o is the word for wind but then when it came time to come up with a word for storm yeah I could have made a brand new word you can obviously see that they're not related in English there's wind and storm but I thought I ought to be fun to actually make this word a derivation of another word so I started with jennie-o which is the word for wind and so from Jimmy o we get Jim asthma JAL MASMA is like a big wind or a great wind and that is the word that's used for storm and then this is how I actually made Daenerys his last name Yin Maz mo Jen Maz mo is kind of like of the storm and that's how you get the idea of Daenerys Stormborn up next or miscellaneous categories one of the things that of course you'll have to eventually run into when it comes to creating a language is the number system first is the number system going to be base 10 or not in English there's a big stop kind of like a ten then at 20 then 30 and 40 and 50 and so on not all languages are like that for example if you have a base 8 number system what is written 1 2 is not actually 12 in fact it is 10 when you're creating a writing system a unique writing system for your language you get to decide all right is this thing going to be an alphabet and abjad a syllabary like an abugida or is it going to be something that's more glyph base like a logograph e in an alphabet you have unique characters for vowels and consonants in an objet characters for consonants and that's it in something like an abugida you have a main glyph for a consonant and then some sort of a little addition for a vowel and then in a logograph e you will have glyphs that stand for entire words or parts of words or maybe more than one word depending on exactly how it works the last step to creating a new language is the lexicon the lexicon is all of the words of the language bear in mind that a language like you know English or French or German languages like these have thousands upon thousands of words my largest language Dothraki has 4,000 words and i put a lot of work into it it takes a long long time to create thousands upon thousands of words so basically when it comes to the lexicon when you're to that point you're gonna be working on the language for the rest of your life but yeah it's a lot of fun you can really start wherever you want think about say for example a scenario writing a horse starting a fire and think about what goes into that scenario what's happening and what will the speaker's of this language have words for with respect to that scenario there are so many possibilities in front of you you can just spend days doing this everything that I create goes into a full reference grammar and dictionary document everything is written down so that if somebody else needed to figure this out they could figure it out if you want to make your own language and you want to get really good at it certainly you can study linguistics you can also study many other languages but when you study languages don't study related languages so it's it's cool to study French and Italian in Spanish it's better for you as a language creator to study French and Japanese and Turkish languages that are totally unrelated this is going to help give you a much better idea of exactly how languages can be I have a favorite word in anything in anything and any languages I've created or any of the languages that study if you want to know an interesting word though and it doesn't matter what the language is look up the word for butterfly they always have really really weird and bizarre etymologies it never fails

Channel: WIRED

Views: 915,450

Rating: 4.9520025 out of 5

Keywords: game of thrones, dothraki, valyrian, david j. peterson, david peterson, david peterson game of thrones, game of thrones languages, game of thrones linguist, linguistics, high valyrian, high valyrian language, got, got languages, language expert, linguist, how to speak dothraki, how to speak high valyrian, how to speak valyrian, languages, conlang, constructed languages, con lang, dothraki break down, game of thrones dothraki, speak dothraki, speak valyrian, wired

Id: vDD7bQTbVsk

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/heptavolt]

His book, “The Art of Language Invention” is a PHENOMENAL read. He walks you through the whole conlang process front to back. Can’t recommend it enough.

[u/crepelabouche]

“I don’t trust that actors will pull off a tone language correctly.” 😂😂😂

[u/BigMeatBobby]

I saw this in my recommended on Youtube and found it was really informative and thought the people in this sub might find it useful for what they’re working on. Hope it helps

[u/AngelicRanger01]

The Welsh word for butterfly is: Pili-Pala

[u/ruinedskedaddle]

This is awesome - I always wondered how they came up with fictional languages.

[u/iAmTheTot]

If you are genuinely interested in conlangs (fictional languages), I highly recommend Vulgar. Better yet, it's on sale currently for the GoT finale (hah, relevant).

It's so stupidly in depth at the single press of a button, with tons of customization if you want to have a more hands-on approach to your language.

[u/cherubclub]

This actually really helped with my language, I checked his other stuff and it’s realllllly helpful

[u/QuadrillionthReal]

Brain like Berkeley