Gone
are the days when you could have a show about a fantasy world where
characters spout random, made-up gibberish as their "language." When you
put a lot of thought into the costumes, weaponry, and hair styles of
your invented culture, you had better give it a proper language too.
That way motivated fans—and there will be fans this motivated—can figure
out the system to it and even learn to speak it themselves. The
producers of
Game of Thrones did the smart thing when they
hired language creator David Peterson to work out realistic languages
for the show. This season fans will be getting to know two new
languages, High and Low Valyrian. But before you start trying to tackle
those, here are seven cool facts about the language from the first two
seasons, Dothraki.
1. Peterson got the job to create Dothraki by winning a contest among language inventors.
The
Language Creation Society
was founded in 2007 as an organization where people who invent
languages as an artistic and intellectual hobby (known as "conlangers"
from "constructed language") could share their work and promote their
craft. When producers approached them asking for help creating Dothraki,
the society held an internal contest and selected Peterson's 180-page
proposal (along with dictionary and audio files) to present to the
producers, who hired him.
2. A lot of what's in the vocabulary and grammar of Dothraki has never appeared on the show.
With Peterson's dictionary of over 3000 words, and his description of
the proper way to form a wide range of sentence types, you could say
all kind of things in correct Dothraki that have never been uttered on
the show. Want to compose some wedding vows? Write a poem? Translate
Shakespeare?
Learn Dothraki and give it a go!
3. One grammatical feature was inspired by Dwight Schrute.
Last fall NBC aired an episode of
The Office where Dwight
tries to convince Erin to learn Dothraki instead of French. The writers
did their homework and (without consulting Peterson) managed to use
valid Dothraki. They even extended the grammar in an interesting way.
Peterson had not yet explicitly described how noun-verb compounds work,
but he noticed the Dothraki compound examples Dwight has written on a
piece of paper—
foth aggendak (I throat-rip),
foth aggendi (you throat-rip),
foth aggenda (he/she/it throat-rips)—and decided to deem it good Dothraki. That construction is now known as a "
Schrutean compound."
4. Peterson's wife and cat are lovingly honored in the vocabulary.
In a sweet gesture, Peterson's took his wife's name, Erin, and turned
it into the Dothraki adjective meaning kind or good, from which is
derived the verb "erinat" (to be good) and the noun "erinak" (lady, kind
one). The word "okeo" is a tribute to a beloved cat, adopted by
Peterson and his wife while he was beginning to work on the language. At
the shelter the cat's name was "Oreo" but the way it was written on his
tag made it look like "Okeo," so that's what they called him. Okeo died
at 7 months from a congenital liver problem, but his name lives on as
the Dothraki word for "friend."
5. If the actors ad-lib any Dothraki, it has to be retrofitted to the grammar.
The last Dothraki line of season 2 was ad-libbed by Iain Glen, who
plays Jorah. In some bit of last minute shooting, the producers had sent
Peterson an emergency request for a translation of "take all the gold
and jewels," but the translation he provided didn't make it in time, so
Glen improvised something. Later Peterson took the ad-libbed line, and
figured out a way to make it proper Dothraki by deriving a couple of new
words and assuming some minor mistakes on the part of Jorah (who is not
a native Dothraki speaker). He managed to plausibly get the improvised
line to mean "the loose valuables are for loading," which
fit both the language and the situation perfectly.
6. Dothraki has tongue-twisters.
Qafak qov kaffe qif qiya fini kaf faggies fakaya.
Say it three times fast. It means "the trembling questioner crushed the
bleeding boar that squished a kicking corn bunting." Hear it
here.
7. Dothraki includes interesting cultural metaphors in its idioms.
Athastokhdevishizar: Nonsense (lit. "fog talking")
Hash yer dothrae chek?: How are you? ("Do you ride well?")
Shierak qiya: Comet ("bleeding star")
Ki fin yeni!: WTF! ("By what failure!")
Thirat atthiraride: To dream ("to live a wooden/fake life")
Fonas chek!: Goodbye! ("Hunt well!")
Image credit: Gameofthrones.wikia.com/
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