Hacker News Reader

Comment by billforsternz | Hacker News Reader

On Game of Thrones we accept for convenience's sake that the dominant on-screen culture speak English, despite this being, you know, an alien world. That's cheating on a huge scale if you think about it a little, so why not extend the cheating a little and re-use Lithuanian (say) or some other natural language as a proxy for Dothraki rather than going to all the trouble of inventing a whole new freaking language.

View on HN

Unlike Tolkien, George R.R. Martin never created full-fledged languages for his books, but he did make up a bunch of words. I guess they didn't want to replace those with different words from other real-world languages.

One of the challenges for David Peterson was to 'retrofit' the languages he created to what Martin had already made up. He coined a bunch of words and phrases for the books, and those needed to make sense and be grammatically correct in the newly created languages.

The phrase "valar morghulis", meaning "all men must die" in High Valyrian is a nice example. Peterson made the -ar suffix indicate the collective number. This is expressed by 'all' in English, but in many languages this is a separate number from singular and plural. He also added a paucal number (meaning "a few"). vala (man), vali (men), valun (a few men), valar (all men).

Thanks, I didn't know any of that. So my modified proposal is to add these words and phrases as deltas on top of your selected natural language. Still saving 99%+ of the work involved in inventing a new language.

I guess... but that's so boring! ;)

Of course you are right, and I suppose I am basically speaking with tongue in cheek. I am sure inventing languages accounted for an absolute minuscule percentage of the lavish GoT budget. So why not use the opportunity to be a perfectionist and do something very cool and fun ?

Still if you are ever looking to create your own fantasy series on a shoestring, maybe my idea has merit...

Historical Baggage. If someone starts speaking Russian, we've got a whole cultural idea of what it means for them to be speaking that language. I expect they wouldn't want to tint character personalities with biases from reality.

Which is why you wouldn't pick Russian. You need something more obscure and exotic sounding, that the vast majority of the audience wouldn't recognize. There are a lot of such languages. Possibly Lithuanian was too conservative. Basque anyone? For Dothraki you really just need something really alien sounding.

Early in Game of Thrones when Khaleesi (sp?) hooked up with the Dothraki warrior guy ("you are my moon" etc.) I would infuriate the office GoT geek by my inability to remember any of the names in general, and my humorous (to me) habit of referring to said warrior as "the Klingon dude" in particular. To me if he looks like a Klingon and sounds like a Klingon...

"Make the world feel big" is rule number 5 or 6.

"Your audience is lazy" is rule number 2 or 3.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com