"Dune" and the delicate art of making fictional languages

He's not a huckster. I know some of the conlang crowd including him.

What he is, is obsessed with a particular idea of how realistic the process of creating conlangs must be. And in what sense that process must be realistic. Instead of creating languages that please the audience, he creates languages that please the hardcore conlang community. I get it. As a language geek the results are pleasing.

As a Dune fan he did the book and fandom a great disservice and that sucks. He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune. Sometimes realism makes something feel more real and tangible. But at other times it makes it feel pointlessly inaccessible. What's better? One kind of realism for language geeks or the integrity of the author's vision for the story? There's a clear answer for him.

You can only appreciate his work and his choices if you dig deep. And virtually no one does. Even hardcore fans.

There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it. Just like say Hebrew. Or he could declare that it became a liturgical language like Latin or Vedic Sanskrit and so remained unchanged. But that's not language geek fun.

Also his example of Beowulf is, as someone who has published many papers and also taught linguistics, just stupid. That didn't happen to Hebrew or Greek or many other languages. English went through a massive lexicon, grammar, and pronounciation shift right after it. That was an abrupt non linear change in the language. In any case, with just a little practice you can read it far better than you might think.

It's also just false that words can't be observed long periods. Reconstructions of proto-indo-european show that very likely quite a few words hardly changd.

It's really sad that so many projects are picking only him, just like countless movies pick only a few musicians for their scores. The community is large and there are a lot of curious viewpoints and ideas out there.

The Fremen in Dune are clearly inspired by Muslims but not necessarily Arabs. They are more closely modeled on Chechens. Fremen words like "sietch" and "kindjal" are from the Caucasus.

>religious war

And, you know, the whole "galactic Islam" thing that's being glossed over.

> It's obviously a political decision to remove the Arabic from the movies, especially as it deals with religious war and extremists.

Which is absolutely ridiculous given how much they've taken from MENA countries visually—the most shallow kind of appropriation when it comes to movies.

Interestingly, there is an audio-visual device being used by Paul in the first movie. Thinking Machines were destroyed (and anything like them, to a degree), but humans still needed to communicate and travel to planets. The Butlerian Jihad was not about destroying all technology.

The most devastating effect of the movement, was that most planets were largely governed by AI or less commonly cyborgs (cymeks). Rejection/Destruction of these machines left populations in utter chaos, from their managed state. Starvation, brutalism, etc. Imagine if any large country just stopped following a political and legal structure, eliminating anyone and anything who happened to support it. This was the cost of freeing humanity (according to the doctrine).

This was my thought as well. Why are we assuming they'd even have access to many preserved audio recordings knowing that they destroyed all computers? The Butlerisn Jihad was thousands of years before the events of the movie.

Not necessarily lost, but certainly diluted by the content produced later. The lack of AI or even sophisticated computing creates a further problem in keeping that content indexed in ways that preserve its relevance and allow it to be surfaced.

Another consideration is how suppressed previous knowledge was during the time the AI ruled over humans and how much was really lost during the Butlerian Jihad.

I'm not sure the Dune universe is fully elaborated from our days, but I would assume that every early human colony established by sleeper ships or embryo carriers would have a curated subset of human culture selected for maximising colony success. With that kind of redundancy, it'd be difficult to completely eradicate such information.

Yes, but they are perfectly understandable.

Compare to Chinese, where dialects that separated a few hundred years ago are not mutually intelligible. I mean like, different Hakka dialects that arose two hundred years ago are not understandable to each other.

1800s English is Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, etc. Imagine the language changed so much you can't understand any of it

We're crossing one century of audio reproduction now, and... it really seems pretty conservative. Play a radio show from 1920's middle America and there are almost no linguistically significant changes from modern American English. Almost all the change has been superficial stuff like idioms and choice of vocabulary. No vowel shifting, no new grammar (or lost grammar), new added or removed articles or prepositions, no new ways of expressing tense.

I'm not a linguist, but over any other four generations you'd surely expect to see a lot of this stuff change.

I think it's less that they're listening to old earth recodings on arrakis and more that having high quality linguistic capture like that allows linguistic forms to persist in a way they didn't before. They're listening to audio from 100 years ago, that sound like the audio from 100 years before that...etc.

Frank Herbert talked about this in his own words in his introduction to _Eye_ and his son talks about it in more detail in _Dreamer of Dune_. Herbert was fascinated by the power of leaders when followers aren't skeptical of them.

That was the foreword to Dune Messiah.

"Basically, you can't have nice things because that's what it means to be human."

But I would disagree to this conclusion. I rather think his goal was (among many others) to show that you cannot have nice things, when your "heros" of the culture stand for glorious war. No matter if it was a "good war" at first.

I think it's not really possible to have a black and white analysis of Paul's character, because the timescale matters - which is better explained in the books.

How could one choose between a jihad (bad on short term) and the golden path (good on very long term)? Especially if the golden path requires nasty personal sacrifices?

Paul did not like the choices he had (understandable) but can't say he was clearly a hero or an anti-hero.

Ya, at least there's enough there there (despite the paucity of canon) to communicate and be creative; eg https://sites.google.com/view/tinglangbelta/xom

  — Oh Stewardess, I speak Belter.
    He's in great pain and wants to know if you can help.
  — Tili natet 'ratna. Im gonya leta-kom *mediting
    detim im bek fo du to gut.

I believe Tolkien's languages remain the "gold standard", but I'm not sure if they're as productive for everyday chat and memes.

(I have heard that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda made a big mistake in not creating any swear words for Modern Hebrew, leading to a substantial overlap in comprehensible swearing between jewish and arabic communities in J'lem. That said, I understand "chinga tu madre ... cabrón" perfectly well, so probably any language communities in close contact will swear at each other perfectly comprehensibly whether they share a vocabulary or not)

I think the show struck a good balance for an English-speaking audience. We see Belters code-switch between "more Belter" with Belter-only crews to "more English" when they gather in groups with other factions or Inners. Public address systems we hear in the background are usually bilingual (Belter+English on stations, Chinese+English on Mars, etc). It feels multilingual without needing lots of subtitles.

I think it's probably the gold standard in terms of the language creation and use in television and movies. I think most, if not all, other television and movies used less of their fictional language than did The Expanse with lang belta. Lang belta permeated the show. Of course, they had to balance that with understandability, so they sprinkled lang belta. But, they sprinkled it everywhere.

Sa sa Ke!

Yeah, it was much better than when a screenwriter inserts 5 Spanish words they remember from school into a script.

The article mentions several other examples of fictional languages in television and movies, including Game of Thrones, and they spent some time talking about those. So, I was surprised they left of lang belta, which is a pretty well developed fictional language, probably better than any of the examples from the article.

One thing I absolutely loved about the first Dune movie was the incorporation of secret hand signals (covert sign language) from the book. The use of secret hand signal conveys the gravity and peril of the world they live in.

> A typical SciFi space opera wasn't really a thing when Herbert wrote the books.

Huh? Space opera was well established long before Dune[0]:

"Despite this seemingly early beginning, it was not until the late 1920s that the space opera proper began to appear regularly in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories.[7]: 10–18 [16] In film, the genre probably began with the 1918 Danish film, Himmelskibet.[20] Unlike earlier stories of space adventure, which either related the invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials, or concentrated on the invention of a space vehicle by a genius inventor, pure space opera simply took space travel for granted (usually by setting the story in the far future), skipped the preliminaries, and launched straight into tales of derring-do among the stars. Early stories of this type include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (Weird Tales, January 1925),[18] The Second Swarm (Amazing Stories Quarterly, spring 1928) and The Star Stealers (Weird Tales, February 1929), Ray Cummings' Tarrano the Conqueror (1925), and Edmond Hamilton's Across Space (1926) and Crashing Suns (Weird Tales, August–September 1928).[16] Similar stories by other writers followed through 1929 and 1930. By 1931, the space opera was well established as a major subgenre of science fiction.[citation needed]"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera#History

That humanity was forcibly stagnant during that period is kinda explicitly the point, though.

Normally I would agree on those timescales, but… the whole point of God Emperor is stultifying stasis, specifically to build up so much tension that humanity explodes outward.

So in this case “language stood still” doesn’t seem particularly out of place.

That's like... anti Neal Stephenson. He feels the need to describe exactly what the thing he introduces works like. Repeatedly.

The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy by M. John Harrison is quite good for that, too.

Thats because the son is not anywhere near as talented of an author as his father.

Too bad, because that's what they're called, in conlang circles and everywhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_language

I wish there was more background on this. What was original concept with putting Zen Buddhism and Islam together?

Did Herbert have a plan for this combo, or was he just making up some future backstory? Like sometimes happens when authors aren't really sure there will be a sequel at all, and just scatter some future references around.

They are very much Muslim if they believe in God. That's the actual meaning of the word.

I think this is the strongest reason to avoid it, and I would have done the same. It's just going to lead the audience to weird places and confusion. And distract from all of the other things Dune has going for it. Replicating the EFFECT on the audience of a book written in 1965 is really a big undertaking.

Even if you ignore the rather blunt stereotyping and selective aspects of Islamic cultures that Herbert injected. Or carried over from another story, as was highlighted earlier.

I assumed some of that was because they kept, and highlighted really, the fact that their religion was the result of deliberate manipulation by the Bene Gesserit. I can’t remember if they explicitly say “planted prophets,” but it felt more plain than in the book; I can see how making that statement when the culture is explicitly Arabic and the religion Islam would be more incendiary than science fiction is usually trying to be.

But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune. The people who read it as kids and found its word-building novel either never watched Lawrence of Arabia or know nothing about the history of the Middle East.

That's not to say the book isn't enjoyable, or even great. It's just that it mashes together various real people and historical incidents and draws much of its power from them. If you know the real story, it's impossible not to notice the parallels. If you remove the parallels, you lose the story's power.

if some social group today finds itself 'put off' by arabic words and imagery, does that make it more praiseworthy to omit arabic words from a story you are telling them, or to emphasize arabic words in a story you are telling them? i would tend more towards the latter; i don't think that kind of thing merits coddling

To be honest I think it makes it more important to keep it.

This is not a strong justification. If you switched out "arabic words and imagery" for say "blackface" would it still hold? There was a time where seeing non-white actors in film would have been considered distracting and off-putting, but we seem to have moved past that as a society, so why are we holding on to this justification now?

Moreover, distracting and off putting to whom? This article, in part, is responding to how distracting it is for fans of the books and readers to see the source material changed in a pretty crucial way. As others have said, its not exactly obvious to me that the use of these words and language are even possible to separate from the core story.

I get that this is a film executive's decision looking at the commercial viability of their product if they whitewash the story (or not), but at the end of the day we can't really say what the commercial success would (or wouldn't) have been if this language were preserved. To me this demonstrates more the entrenchment of the people who are in the position to make these choices rather than what audiences are willing to consume.

After all, consider the fact that Dune has remained important enough, despite the claim that Arabic (and specifically Muslim) imagery is used throughout that someone decided to greenlight two feature film adaptations so far.

Lawrence of Arabia came out in 1962 - probably the main point of reference.

When we dumb things down for the lowest common denominator, we're just left with slop. I understand the economic incentive to reach the widest audience possible, but I wish our culture was better at telling idiots to go pound sand.

> Respectfully I think this is reading too deep into it. Herbert borrowed Arabic words and concepts to build a hardy middle-eastern-adjacent culture, it's hardly the focus of the book.

https://reactormag.com/the-muslimness-of-dune-a-close-readin...

It's more than that.

The Fremen follow the Zensunni religion (exactly what it sounds like), so continuity with real world cultures is a big part of the story. Another example, the Bene Gesserit are called Reverend Mother.

Amusingly, neither Zendaya nor Javier Bardem are Middle-Eastern, but they can easily play so because skin color works that way. I think the fact that it could just as well be a post-El-Niño Chihuahuan desert makes sense too.

chechnya and dagestan are actually rather far from the middle east, and that's where imam shamil was fighting

I've reviewed this kind of Dune background material and I still don't quite get how the Zensunnis and others managed to get to other star systems before the advent of FTL. I've seen no mention of (for example) generation ships.

And the Padishah Emperor is called Shaddam IV.

Dune the novel, is where I learned the word "jihad" long before it was commonly known. It wasn't used in the film much, since as noted, the world has moved on.

Harkonnen is actually a real-world Finnish surname.

A lot of the story and setting is taken almost _word for word_ from Sabres of Paradise, which takes place in the Caucuses, before the soviet union existed and before America got involved in the middle east.

https://arnoldkhan.medium.com/how-the-sabre-of-paradise-insp...

Anecdotally I've seen quite a few Muslim sci-fi fans say that they enjoyed all the references to their culture in Dune. You might also find this interesting: https://reactormag.com/the-muslimness-of-dune-a-close-readin...

Speaking as a Russian, the only real reference to Russian specifically in the books is Vladimir Harkonnen's first name, which was amusing when it first came up, but it doesn't really seem to play any specific role (and ofc his last name is Finnish, so, like most other things in this universe, if it's a cultural reference, it's very syncretic). There is another reference to a broader Slavic culture in one of the Fremen chants in the first book, though:

   ima trava okolo
   i korenja okolo

This does not directly correspond to any existing Slavic language, but it is very recognizable to most speakers of such - "trava" is grass, "korenja" (pronounced as "korenya") are "roots", and "okolo" literally means "around" (from "kolo", circle), and in some Slavic languages became more generic "nearby". So the snippet should really translate as "grass is around/near, and roots are around/near", but Herbert translates it as "these are the grasses and these are the roots". Then again, many clearly Arabic phrases also have meanings that are similar but not exactly the same as what they really mean, and the book sort of implies that it's just the result of language evolution over time. But it is rather interesting that Fremen of all people apparently have some Slavic language as part of its history. Given that the snippet most closely resembles South Slavic languages, it is likely a reference to Bosniaks specifically, but it's never really elaborated further.

> On the one hand I imagine that Russian and Arabic viewers would find inclusions from their languages very distracting, but then the story is so clearly about Americans and Russians squabbling over colonized Arabic territory

It isn't, though between the time it was conceived and written and when it became popular things the world situation had evolved so that became a popular interpretation.

The Harkonnen are stereotypical medieval despots, almost cartoonishly so.

On the contrary, as the Fremen are shown to be the oppressed indigenous, the movie would be stoned for casting jihad in too positive a light, as an admirable ideal! The book hardly shows the Great Houses nor the Imperium as any better than the savage freedom fighters. If anything the series isn't really sympathetic towards any particular subgroup of humanity.

I think largely so, very likely.

Just from memory, there was also the name "Usul" described as meaning "the strength at the base of the pillar". In the same context, I could see that drawing outrage too.

I'm sure that's part of it.

Within the lifetime of the universe, all futures are possible. I don't find it particularly interesting whether that future is directly a result of us, or some completely identical hominid that evolved the same way on the other side of the galaxy.

Paul was trying to avoid the Jihad too. It was a fairly major plot point.