Interviews: Ask David Peterson About Inventing Languages

samzenpus writes: David J. Peterson is a language creator and author. He created the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for HBO's Game of Thrones, and more recently has created languages for the CW's The 100 and MTV's The Shannara Chronicles. His new book, The Art of Language Invention, details how to create a new language from scratch, and goes over some of the specific choices he made in creating the languages for Game of Thrones and Syfy's Defiance. David has agreed to give us some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Comments

Are your languages web-scale?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered creating a thread-safe language which avoids buffer overflows? Do you think this would be made easier by making whitespace significant?

Re:Are your languages web-scale?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

I laughed. Virtual +1 Funny to you, since Slashdot hasn't given me any moderation points in nearly a year.

What makes a language seem natural.

[blueshift_1]

What do you feel helps make a language feel natural (as though it was created and evolved by a culture) rather than something created more synthetically for a work of fiction?

What's the point of grammar and syntax?

[TheCreeep]

Most people never bother to give a fictional language a second look, they only happen to listen to the way it sounds, in passing. This makes the vocabulary and the distribution of letters / letter combinations the most important part. What, then, is the point of working on the grammar and syntax of a synthetic language, rather than using simplistic ones? Is it for the benefit of the language geeks out there, is it art for art's sake, or does it affect our perception of that language in ways we don't necessarily see?

Re:What's the point of grammar and syntax?

[gstoddart]

I offer a counter example of just how many speak Klingon.

I should think it's better because it sounds more authentic than someone standing there going "booga booga", and because if you plan on sub-titling things, people might notice if you don't make an effort. Especially if a phrase will be used more than once.

I've watched a bunch of special features/making of for various movies, and the ones which do this can build in much more complex layers and nuance, and sell it as a believable thing ... from Tolkien to the latest Superman, the added depth of creating your own languages makes it seem more plausible and real than "booga booga".

My favorite example of this came from the movie Ultraviolet, which admittedly isn't the best piece of cinema ever. There is a spot in which someone, ostensibly a Chinese speaker, says "xin loi" to say "sorry", which through a Vietnamese friend I recognized as not Chinese but Vietnamese.

If you just have actors say any old gibberish, or pass off one language as another ... someone WILL notice. In that case someone must have decided any Asian language would suffice, because it all sounds the same anyway.

If I spotted it, and I know no more than about 3-4 words of Vietnamese, every Chinese and Vietnamese speaker heard it and went "WTF was that about?".

Re:What's the point of grammar and syntax?

[newcastlejon]

Back when George Lucas gave a crap, the story is that he sampled a number of languages for Star Wars. I think either the Ewoks (or maybe Jawas) are actually speaking a rare dialect from Mongolia and Nien Nunb (Lando's copilot) speaks a language usually heard in Kenya.

As for Klingon, the syntax was purposely designed to make it sound alien, and this is especially noticeable if you try to learn a few phrases. To most Western ears the word order is pretty much backwards; it's generally object-verb-subject, but for basic sentences the subject pronoun is often omitted making it object-subject-verb.* The sounds too were purposely chosen to sound alien, through use of sounds that are very rarely found in most languages. An example of this is the first letter in tlhIngan {Klingon}. tlh represents a single 'letter', the closest equivalent to which that I can think of is the double L found in Welsh.

One can be forgiven for bashing Trek, but no-one could deny that Marc Okrand has put considerable effort into developing a language used for perhaps only a few minute's worth of dialogue. It's not quite up there with Tolkien's work, some might say, but I've found learning it on and off a very interesting distraction even if it is mainly used for fleet MOTDs.

*For example, jaghpu' DIHIv maH is equivalent to jaghpu' DIHIv (jaghpu' {enemies} DIHiv {we attack them} maH {we}. The subject pronoun is redundant in this example and is usually only included if the phrase would be ambiguous without it, perhaps where the object of the sentence may or may not be plural (plurality is similarly normally determined by context).

tl;dr it's really for the nerds' benefit and a show of dedication to one's profession.

Re:What's the point of grammar and syntax?

[tepples]

What some people refer to as "simplest grammar" is probably isolating morphology. This is more common in creoles (languages recently formed out of a pidgin) than elsewhere. English itself is a product of partial creolization, namely with Norman French after the invasion of 1066, which is part of why it's less inflected than its close cousin German. Using simple or not-so-simple morphology shows whether or not the language is widely learned by second-language learners.

But isolating morphology is also common in languages that have eroded words' initial and final consonants so far that they have cheshirized into tones, and tones are more common in humid climates.

Synthetic language decyphering game

[TheCreeep]

Have you ever worked on a project like a book/app/website/parallel reality game where the reader/player's role would be to decipher one of your synthetic languages, given clues? Does that sound like something you would consider doing?

Not a Question...

[Stormy Dragon]

...but I just have to marvel at the degree of specialization in advanced economies such that "fake language designer" is actually a viable career possibility.

Just one question:

[fredrated]

what's the point?

Thoughts on an ideal or optimal language?

[shoor]

There can be intense debates about the merits and flaws of one computer language versus another. Some languages have tried to be able to do everything and they usually don't catch on. (PL1 might be the first example.)

Natural human languages are not, for the most part, designed, though grammarians may sometimes try to 'fix' them a bit. But they have flaws. The easiest things to point out are the ambiguities and redundancies. (Some redundancy might be a good thing, allowing a listener to guess at meaning when a speaker isn't heard perfectly.)

Do you deliberately put flaws in languages or, on the other hand, try to design 'ideal' languages that are somehow better than the naturally evolved ones?

Esperanto, Sindarin, Drow

[bluefoxlucid]

Any thoughts on Esperanto (International), Lojban (Semantic), Solresol (Representative of French), Sindarin (Tolkien), Drow (Dungeons and Dragons), and Klingon (Star Trek)?

I've noticed Esperanto seems to produce propaedeutic effects by either loading quickly (it's *fast* to learn) or directing more attention to the analysis of a language's structure (by nature, it encourages the student to do this). It's a very structured language, in terms of word construction.

Lojban is supposed to be unambiguous; I think Esperanto achieves that exactly as well, due to its grammatical structure, in so much that Lojban is *semantically* unambiguous (we know what in the sentence represents the subject, verb, direct object, adjective, adverb, etc.) but can be *conceptually* ambiguous. Your thoughts?

This leads to things like Solresol, Sindarin, and Klingon. They all seem to have a point: Solresol encodes French to music; Sindarin is supposed to "sound pretty"; and Klingon is supposed to sound harsh. How do people come up with this kind of thing? Is that even a valid concept? Is there any interesting aspect of these sorts of languages which I should consider, or are they just as essentially bland as any other?

International Auxiliary Language

[Idontpostmuch]

On a Reddit AMA you said that you don't think any constructed International Auxiliary Language has a good shot of becoming a world language "for a million reasons that have nothing to do with language." I would be interested to hear about some of those reasons.

"Robust" artificial Languages

[BitterKraut]

It sometimes bothers me that in the movies, people hardly ever make any grammar mistakes. Not even children. And when they do, it usually sounds artificial. Apparently, speaking like an ordinary person does is even harder to imitate than drunkenness. Now our obsession with grammatical correctness is certainly a very recent development in the history of the human species. I doubt very much that ordinary Roman citizens, or ancient Greeks, let alone Egyptians or Babylonians, ever mocked or corrected each other's grammar. I'd rather think that when people understood what you meant, your grammar was considered correct, so to speak. (Actually it wasn't considered at all.) Do the artificial languages you create, when they are spoken in fictional communities more archaic than our own, allow for more realism with respect to how people actually speak in their daily lives?