One of the most interesting announcements to warm geek hearts in connection to HBO’s Game of Thrones was the decision by the executive producers to hire someone to create the Dothraki language for the show. They turned to the Language Creation Society, and with their help selected David J. Peterson to create the language. Below, he answers a few of our questions about the creation process.
How long did the research process take before you really started? What sort of things did you pull from the books that were important to shaping your approach?
Research was ongoing throughout the entire process. In addition to bringing my own background in linguistics to bear on the project, I’d also hunt through my own store of language dictionaries to learn how words from various languages came to exist. I found myself constantly pondering one of two questions regarding new lexemes: (1) What’s likely? and (2) What’s not implausible? A good naturalistic conlang will strike a balance between the two (i.e. the choices made will be plausible, but they won’t simply be copies of vocabulary and structures in existing natural languages).
In addition to that, though, reading the books was invaluable, because it helped to flesh out the world through the eyes of the Dothraki. Though there’s little vocabulary in book three, for example, we see Dany visiting places on the outskirts of the Dothraki Sea that the Dothraki themselves would visit. The peoples and customs of those areas would be known to the Dothraki, and they’d be able to speak about them in their language. Little by little, then, the world that can be described by the Dothraki language expanded.
As for conlanging itself, the online language creation community itself was my teacher. I’ve spent the past decade of my life learning from everyone. There is no more invaluable resource than experience, and I’ve learned from my own and that of many, many other fantastic conlangers.
What kind of freedom did you have in coming up with Dothraki idiom?
Pretty much complete freedom. Of course, I had to include all the extant vocabulary (and accommodate the names), but other than that, I could do what I wanted with the language, within reason (i.e. within the dictates of what I felt to be appropriate for a naturalistic language grounded in the universe that George R. R. Martin had created). With that freedom, I’ve tried my best to create the most authentic language I could manage. The work itself (A Song of Ice and Fire) demands nothing less.
In this second episode, we start to get some sense of Dothraki religion — the sun is a god, the moon is a wife, the Great Stallion; later on, we learn the Dothraki believe the stars are fallen warriors. Has the Dothraki belief system influenced any particular phrases, whether it’s the cultural attitude towards love, or perhaps associations between warriors and the stars?
I’ve had a lot of fun with that. For example, there’s an expression “shieraki gori”, which means “the stars are charging”. It’s used as a way of wishing someone good luck, or to let them know that things will go well, e.g. “Shieraki gori ha kishaan: Kisha vogaki haesh rakhi ajjalan!” which is, “The stars are charging for us: We shall slaughter the Lamb Men today!” The idea is that if the stars are fallen warriors, then when they’re in attack mode, things are going well for you (unless you happen to be on the other side of the arakh, of course).
Do you still actively add on to the lexicon, or is that on hold until the production asks for something new, now that there’s a second season?
From the beginning, I started building in vocabulary that I thought would appear not just in the first season, but in seasons to come (based on the various chapters set in Essos in the first four books). Generating vocabulary takes a good deal of time and energy, so it never hurts to be prepared—indeed, it makes translation go a lot faster. Plus, working on vocab helps me to keep my general fluency level up (which also aids translation).
There’s a lengthy speech coming from Drogo in this latest episode. How long does it normally take to translate from the script to Dothraki, and then to provide the ancillary material for the actors, such as the MP3s that you’ve mentioned in other interviews?
I remember that recording. Apart from everything else, it took me about forty minutes (and dozens of attempts) to get that recorded in a way that I was happy with. I feel for Jason! Probably a lot more work for him than that last scene of his in episode 3, for example.
For the scripts, translating was only part of it. As this is a created language, if I didn’t happen to have the vocabulary I needed, I’d have to create it, which is an involved process. Once I had the vocabulary, translating a line doesn’t take much time. I usually give a line a first pass, and then double check to make sure everything is conjugated and declined appropriately. The phonetic transcription would come next, and then the interlinears (not an English translation, but a gloss of each word and affix). The interlinear would serve as my third pass. I’d go through each line this way for a given script, and when I was done, I’d record them all at once, which actually served as a fourth pass (every so often I’d catch a little error here and there when recording). A full script would take about a week.
Speaking of a second season, have there been any discussions about what role you or other members of the LCS might play? We’re all hopeful Valyrian enters the mix at some point!
I can’t comment on any potential future work yet, but we’d be happy to tackle whatever language creation needs may arise. I know the one language ASoIaF fans are most interested in seeing is High Valyrian. GRRM has described High Valyrian as the Latin of Essos (with languages like Braavosi and Pentoshi being like the Romance languages). For awhile, I didn’t know what I would do with High Valyrian if given the opportunity. We have a lot of names, a couple words, and then the phrases Valar Morghulis and Valar Dohaeris (”All men must die” and “All men must serve”, respectively). Then, a couple of months ago, I kind of had an epiphany and knew *exactly* what I’d do with the nominal and verbal systems, and how those phrases specifically would work. I’d relish the opportunity to bring it to life (in a manner of speaking, since, at the time of the series, High Valyrian is mostly a dead language).
You didn’t just create the Dothraki language for the show. You’re also credited as helping develop Ashai’i and a language called Skroth. Now, Ashai’i is obvious enough, since Ashai is a locale often mentioned in the books. But Skroth is not something directly named in the text. Our understanding is that it’s a kind of language created for the white walkers. Could you explain just how that developed?
Back in February, Greg Spence approached me about creating some language-like elements for the Others for the opening scene of Episode 1—something that sounded appropriate, or that could be manipulated to sound appropriate. All of us had the same description to go off of: “his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake” (from the prologue). Greg and his team had some ideas, and I had some ideas as well, so I put together a phonological sketch for them, and some language-like dialogue. They then manipulated it, and I think the result is rather like the sound of the cracking of ice on a winter lake.
Regarding the name, I needed to come up with some sort of name, so that was it. It suits the sounds system.
The fact that the “language” for the white walkers basically seems to be various sounds like sharp cracks and creaks, how in the world did you actually develop that? The phonology must have been very strange!
Not so strange, actually. My idea was that cracking ice (imagine crunching an icecube in your mouth) sounds like semi-quiet periods of compression interspersed by short periods of noisy cracking/crashing—and, as ice has no vocal cords, the noise is voiceless. So I figured the entire sound system would be voiceless (only voiceless consonants, and vowels, likewise, aren’t voiced, but are whispered), and words should be built in such a way that there are noisy consonant clusters or fricatives at the beginning and end of a syllable, with a whispered vowel in between (the word “Skroth” is a nice example). On my end, I recorded the “dialogue” as faithfully as I could, and then added some effects to it to give them an idea what I was thinking, and they worked their magic. I think the end result is great.
At present, this is just a phonological sketch. If there were enough interest in it, it has the ability to be expanded into a full language. (The same is true of Ashai’i, incidentally.)
To go a bit further afield, I know some other created languages were developed with a belief — or at least a conceit — that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true in its “strong” form: language directly determines thought. I believe Klingon, for example, was created with this idea, that the Klingon language directly shaped the aggressive, warrior culture. Where do you stand on the theory, both in real world terms, and in terms of whether it’s a useful or meaningful conceit to have when creating a language?
I’m not sure how many linguists take the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seriously, but I put no store in it (I’m also not completely sold on the weak version). In fact, I decided to have a little fun with the idea, by making no gender distinctions in the grammar of the language (the pronoun /me/ means “she”, “he” or “it”, depending on context). As in real life, though, gender-neutral pronouns don’t guarantee gender-equality amongst the Dothraki. I think if one is creating a naturalistic language, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would be something to avoid—that, however, is because *I* don’t really put credence in it. Another naturalistic conlanger might, and therefore might very well make use of it, which is cool. I’m always interested to see what someone will do with any linguistic theory in a conlang.
Have you taken influence from other languages/cultures which share traits with the Dothraki?
Elsewhere I’ve mentioned natural languages that have influenced Dothraki (at various places and to varying degrees, Arabic, Spanish and Russian come to mind), but the largest influences were probably a few of my own languages—Zhyler and Kamakawi, in particular—and even then, not the grammar, so much as the way the lexicon is built and fleshed out. Culturewise, I tried to find etymologies that date back to the Iron Age (which is about where the Dothraki are, it seems). Digging back through languages I know well (Romance languages, English, Hawaiian) proved useful just to see how it is that various peoples conceived of and characterized various phenomena that we now take for granted—or have lost touch with (e.g. I don’t do a lot of smithing or weaving [though, of course, there are people who do, and they rock!]).
Is there something you wanted to include in Dothraki, but weren’t able to for various reasons – whether a complicated morphology that looked like fun, phonemes, or something else along those lines?
Vowel harmony is my favorite phonological system to play with, but if multiple people are going to be working with a language, such a system requires coordination—the same goes for any kind of stem-internal phonological or morphological change (even something common like intervocalic voicing). To be safe, I figured I’d better leave stems alone, for the most part (or at least forms that might be used as citation forms, like the nominative form of nouns). Otherwise I might have tried to implement a triconsonantal root system (à la Arabic) again. I did that with my very first language, and have always wanted to take another crack at it, since it wasn’t done naturally the first time around.
You’ve looked a lot at etymology and word construction, from the bits given in the books. What’s been one of your favourite new words or sentences you’ve constructed?
I’ve had fun with the various rotating words for “girl” and “woman”. I get the sense that the Dothraki are kind of youth-centric, in the sense that able bodied men and women are revered above the lame, the infirm and the elderly (cf. Daenerys V in GoT; it seems the only elderly that are respected are the dosh khaleen, who, of course, are former khaleesis [and may have been respected or at least revered already], and over whom an aura of mystery hangs). Given the general power structure in a khalasar, I figured this might lead to a kind of push chain in the vocabulary for women.
The original word for “woman” was *ɣesi (and you can see a reflex of it in a word like “khaleesi”, which was originally khal + *ɣesi [with an epenthetic vowel inserted for euphony]). The word for “girl”, though, was used with increasing frequency over time, and is now the word for “woman”: “chiori”. The older form *ɣesi exists still in the /-eesi/ suffix (not really productive, but occurs in a few lexemes), and also in the modern word “yesi”, which means something like “crone”.
To replace the old word for “girl”, a pet name parents used with their daughters was promoted to full word status: “nayat”, which was a word for a particular type of mushroom. That particular word was used as a pet name because in Dothraki, trees (and other plants that stand up from the ground) are characterized as busts (i.e. the leafy part of the tree is called “nhare”, which is the word for a human’s head; the trunk is called “lenta”, which is the word for “neck”; and the interior of a trunk is referred to by “fotha”, which is “throat”). Anyway, the particular mushroom I’m thinking of has an ovate cap, and resembles a child’s head with long hair falling at the sides (unbraided). That was how the initial association with young girls arose. In modern Dothraki, the word no longer has any connection to mushrooms.
That was a great interview. Thank you!