Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who Invents Languages For a Living
An anonymous reader writes: David J. Peterson is fluent in eight languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Esperanto, Arabic and American Sign Language, but it is the languages he's created that gives him notoriety. He created Dothraki, Giant, and High Valyrian for Game of Thrones, Shiväisith for Thor: The Dark World, and four different languages for the TV show Defiance. Peterson recently sat down with NPR to talk about inventing languages for a living, and offers some advice on how to make your own.
(This is Esperanto, by the way)
So say we all
Inventing language facilitates communication, inventing another language hinders it.
Do ro to ko so bo, mo fo.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'll try a translation into english:
Gender preference,
parent poster is unsure.
Fears he might like men.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I would add a second thought: First, it doesn't make sense to have an invented place speak a real language in lieu of an invented one. It just creates a confusing context. Lets say the people of the eastern regions in Game of Thrones would speak a language like the Mansi language. It would somehow place Westernesse into the Ural mountains as Mansi is spoken east of the Ural. People from West Siberia, who might not speak Mansi, but recognize the sound of it would always be somehow reminded of their home land instead of being immersed in a phantasy world, and the Mansi people then would then wonder if the people of Westeros should somehow be identified with the Russians, and why there is no Khanty language (a neighboring language both locally and linguistically) in the series.
Chosing a language always sets a context, and if you want to control the context, you can't chose languages at will.
Watching Vikings I was surprised when I heard old English (sounds a lot like German) and old French. I don't know enough about Scandinavian languages to know if they're speaking an old Scandinavian dialectic. Now when I watch GoT and they start up in one of their made-up languages I just cringe. It sounds fake and is usually delivered stiffly. Vikings has made GoT painful to watch for me.
Now when I watch GoT and they start up in one of their made-up languages I just cringe. It sounds fake and is usually delivered stiffly.
Unless you focus hardcore on the language, almost to the detriment of everything else... Yeah, it's just going to sound like pulp fantasy jibberish.
There's a reason Tolkien needed nine billion pages and accidently several epics while practicing his cunning linguistics.
Project: EAL (Evolutionary Assembly Language) - The language is still in development, so there is currently no software to download or run - earlier versions were written, but changed very drastically. EAL is not a language necessarily designed for humans - we have plenty of those. This is a language partly designed to be artificially generated by a processing environment, guided by a users' specifications.
Consider a scenario: you have lots of data to convert, but not good logical explanation of exactly "what" you are trying to do, algorithmically speaking. You manually complete 1, 2, 3+ samples of this "process" (perhaps renaming a file based on it's contents, some data conversion, sorting documents, etc) - after a few samples of this task, a pattern should be developing. Your task can now be considered a competition between you and the computer to see who finishes first. The computer can make suggestions to complete the rest of your task, while the user provides feedback to the system and guides the development of the computer's "recommendations" until an ideal solution is presented. This inductive programming scheme is just one of the unique features of this language..
Welcome to any and all feedback, specifications are at: poxix.com/eal.
Esperanto's just Latin with the grammar taked out.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That he is fluent in Ewok language.
don't know enough about Scandinavian languages to know if they're speaking an old Scandinavian dialectic.
I haven't seen the show, but the most historically sensible thing for Vikings to be speaking would be Old Norse. According to some folks on Reddit, that is in fact what they are speaking.
Its not very closely related to English, outside of the fact that they are both Germanic, and their common ancestor language was only 700 years or so in the past at that point.
...oh. But reading through that thread, there were some English in the show speaking Old English.
I'm with you on your main point too. There's just no comparison between some made up noise and a real organic human language.
It kind of reminds me of the movie Congo. I remember seeing breathless articles interviewing a guy about how he created the way guys in gorilla suits pretended to get angry and attack people. It looked nothing like actual angry gorillas, which we aren't exactly bereft of data on. Once the movie actually came out, movie-goers and reviewers were far less impressed with it than the journalists were. It got 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the fake gorillas feature prominently in most negative reviews.
> Dothraki
Isn't that the Game of Thrones language? So like Eskimos and Norwegians supposedly have dozens of words for different kinds of snow, I presume Dothraki has dozens of different words describing the size, texture, hue, and contracture state of the female areola?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Yaté, yaté, yotó."
I have the wookie. For the wookie, I'll take money.
"Yotó. Yotó."
I'll take that money, and I'll take that amount again.
i.e. I'll take 25,000 and another 25,000.
That works, kind of, the "bounty-hunter's" language even seem to be poetic.
Poster says that Peterson has notoriety for inventing languages. Notoriety is the state of being famous or well known for some bad quality or deed. Dictators, mass murderers, criminals -- they have notoriety for their acts. Creating a language is not an evil act, and thus Peterson has not achieved notoriety for it.
Darmok and Jihad with Viagra.
Esperanto's just Latin with the grammar taked out.
You're probably thinking of Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine flexione. That language replaces the inflection-driven grammar of Latin with a more syntax-based approach. Esperanto is some sort of agglutinative mutant Polish with pan-European vocabulary, as Justin B. Rye likes to point out throughout his Ranto.
noH QapmeH wo' Qaw'lu'chugh yay chavbe'lu', 'ej wo' choqmeH may' DoHlu'chugh lujbe'lu'
Also, because Vikings is a good show (until Season 3) - and GoT is crap.
From the list of languages I suspect that the ones he design are built largely around Indo-European (all of the languages are from that family, except Arabic), which is a little disappointing. It was the same even in LotR - you would hope a linguist would be better placed than most to look around in to world of languages, of which there are apparently some 7000+, and find some inspiration.
He did an awesome job with the Hodor language.
Or in Hodor: Hodor hodor, hodor hodor hodor. Hodor? Hodor!
Of all the languages in use today, Icelandic is probably what comes closest to old norse, seeing as it was the vikings that settled Iceland and they've lived a very isolated life there since. In england they mingled with the english, in germany they mingled with the germans, and in scandinavia they mingled with eachother, so the language evolved in many different directions. That being said there's still a word here or there that is understandable.
Yeah, and I'm sure the real gorillas weren't too happy with the movie either.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Have gnu, will travel.
Author's Website
Yeah, and I'm sure the real gorillas weren't too happy with the movie either.
Well, since the "simulated primate choreographer" apparently had no clue what an angry gorilla looks like, he won't ever know the difference.
There is significant evidence that Old English and Old Norse were to a certain extent mutually intelligible. Unfortunately, a number of scenes in Vikings fall flat on their face if you are aware of this.
Also the pronunciation of Old English in the show is rather poor. You would think they would have consulted someone on it but it is obvious that they did not considering the repeated mispronounciation of the vowel 'æ' and 'g' before front vowels. I give them some credit for trying though.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Icelandic definitely comes closest. It has changed remarkably little over the centuries. It has been said that Icelandic is to Old Norse, as Modern English is to Shakespearean English. Thus Icelanders can read Old Norse texts with a little practice.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Ah yippie yi yu
Ah yippie yi yeah
Ah yippie yi yu ah
I was asked by one of my young cousins to translate this music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... into Italian when I was over there nearly 20 years ago. I had to explain that some of it was just meaningless sounds. Can imagine that it would make an interesting question in a linguistics exam to write it down phonetically. I am curious to know if it is a known feature in singing, or if it was just invented.
Icelandic definitely comes closest. It has changed remarkably little over the centuries. It has been said that Icelandic is to Old Norse, as Modern English is to Shakespearean English. Thus Icelanders can read Old Norse texts with a little practice.
If you are a native English speaker you can read Shakespeare with no practice at all. It's the fact that it's poetry that makes it seem "hard" to many people. They'd struggle equally with Walt Whitman.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There is significant evidence [h-net.org] that Old English and Old Norse were to a certain extent mutually intelligible.
The link is interesting, but that's not the mainstream linguistic opinion. If the two were mutually-intelligible, then they shouldn't exist yet at all. They are made up terms defining supposedly mutually-unintelligible languages. IOW: this was an argument that those two languages didn't exist yet, and they were speaking different dialects of "Proto-Germanic". It is arguing that the language families of West Germanic and North Germanic had not yet split into separate languages.
what the purpose of creating a new language? In some countries people already have huge difficulty speaking the original language, let alone learning a new language
The book cites several other sources that are in agreement with its thesis (but claims they are not comprehensive enough). Care to cite the "mainstream linguistic opinion" that they were not mutually intelligible? The link I provided was from a cursory search. I read another book arguing for mutual intelligibility but I have forgotten what it was (this was some 10 years ago). I found it very informative at the time as I wouldn't have guessed at the premise that Anglo-Saxons and "vikings" (not just raiders but also traders) were communicating with each other using their own respective language.
There is more to language names than the content and structure of language. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are still mutually intelligible, yet I think the speakers of those languages would take strong issue with someone wanting to lump each language under one name simply because they are mutually intelligible. Political boundaries, culture, even religion can call for a different name for a language.
Furthermore, it is well known that people alter their register to facilitate communication, especially when speaking two differing varieties. If an American and a Scotsman are speaking, they each tend to avoid terms and sayings that are specific to their own variety that the other is unlikely to understand. The same goes for the Scandinavians: Word choice and grammar are carefully chosen so that the listener will understand.
The same concept applies to Old English versus Old Norse. It is quite possible to pick vocabulary and sentence structure using what we know of each language to produce phrases that are extremely similar to eachother. I don't think anyone is claiming that any valid Old Norse sentence would be understood by Old English speakers and vice versa
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Like nails on a frickin' chalkboard. And sadly not at all hard to find.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
There is more to language names than the content and structure of language. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are still mutually intelligible,
Those are modern languages, which are a whole different kettle of fish. I can't speak to those particular ones (I haven't looked into them much). However, many countries (or even country-aspirant areas) have elevated their local dialects to "languages" for reasons of self-identity rather than logic. The linguistic definition of a separate languages is that they are mutually-unintelligible, and if linguistics is unimpeded by nationalism, (as it mostly is with ancient reconstructed languages like "Old English"), then that's the way it works. Reconstructed languages are by definition not mutually-intelligible with other languages.
"Old English" and "Old Norse" are reconstructed language names. So by definition, if they exist, they are mutually unintelligible. If two people are speaking the precursors to those two languages, but can understand each other, then they are both, by definition, speaking different dialects of Proto-Germanic. This is what the words "dialect" and "language" mean in linguistics.
So to say that English and Danes living in 10th century English had mutually-intelligible speech is equivalent to saying that "Old English" and "Old Norse" were not separate languages yet by the 10th Century (and probably *all* West and North Germanic speakers could understand each other still). I cannot find any reference online that makes that claim. It is simply not mainstream.
Let's take this further. "Old High German" is said to have been an extant language from 700 to 1050 AD. But Old German and Old English are closer related (they are both West Germanic), so if West Germanics could still understand North Germanics, then they could certainly still understand each other. So Old German couldn't have existed yet either.
There is more to language names than the content and structure of language. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are still mutually intelligible, yet I think the speakers of those languages would take strong issue with someone wanting to lump each language under one name simply because they are mutually intelligible. Political boundaries, culture, even religion can call for a different name for a language.
Which made someone quip "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
As a Swede working in Norway our two "languages" are much closer than either of us would care to admit. There are almost dialects of Swedish with a larger difference, and the differences within Norwegian are larger still.
So it's really a case of "army and navy". Any serious linguist ought really to consider them dialects. Spoken Danish is a different and getting more so, but if you can get them to "spit out the porridge" the underlying language is very similar to both. It's almost completely a question of differing in pronunciation, with the odd bit of vocabulary thrown in.
Stefan Axelsson