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Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

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Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#21

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

ghaff wrote: post #4
ggambetta wrote: post #2

I guess this partially explains why making a movie or TV episode can cost millions / hundreds of millions of dollars :-/ Yes, Dothraki being an actual language is probably "better" than Leia speaking gibberish to Jabba, but to me it feels like it's way past the point of diminishing returns.

See also the articles about the level of detail in the costumes in Game of Thrones. There is a lot of attention to detail, probably including a fair bit that doesn't make it on camera, in big budget video/film productions. You could probably cut a lot of it and still have a "pretty good" final product. But being obsessive about detail rather than being content with good enough in all sorts of aspects of production, i…

If there is a lot of money, people will spend it.

As long as everything goes up this is fine.

When things start to get flat, money will dry up.

Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#22

Post by dalbasal »

lazyjones wrote: post #19

I wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced gibberish for movies. We could preserve languages for posteriority and the result would be more realistic.

Sometimes they do. Also, an interest in one seems to closely overlap an interest in the other.

Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#23

Post by DanAndersen »

wool_gather wrote: post #7

For another famous conlang, there's a cool video where Mark Okrand discusses the process of inventing Klingon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Did-eVQDc (He also briefly talks about the Vulcan language at the beginning.) What's interesting here is that he was brought in for the third Star Trek movie. But there was already a small amount of spoken Klingon in the first movie, created by James Doohan. So Okrand, while…

The question of continuity is an interesting one. There was a similar issue for the recent Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, where some of Tolkien's languages are very fragmentary but there was a desire to have more invented speech.

David Salo is a Tolkien scholar who was brought onto the film team to help expand some of Tolkien's conlangs for use in the film. While his work isn't strictly "canonical," he did do a lot of serious work to make his additions fit into what fragments we have. His blog is a good read: https://midgardsmal.com/

Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#24

Post by mihaifm »

lazyjones wrote: post #19

I wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced gibberish for movies. We could preserve languages for posteriority and the result would be more realistic.

I can give you a really good example of that. The languages created for FarCry Primal are based on Proto-Indo-European [1]. I didn't know that at the time I was playing the game, but the more I played the more I got captivated by those languages, since a lot of words sounded familiar. And indeed after doing the research I discovered that they are based on the real ancestor for Indo-European languages. Congrats to Ubisoft for pulling this off.

[1] https://www.player.one/far-cry-primal-interview-how-ubisoft-...

Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#25

Post by adityapurwa »

I am writing a book that also has its own language called Erksar, the language was once a simple modified caesar crypto where I map vocal with another vocal (as a software engineer, it was pretty easy to create translator for it). “I love you” would become “E rufa tu” (it should be “E rufa tui” but I modified the result and tried to remove unnecessary letter). Now that I lost the original character map, some new words is not generated via the translator, but adapted from existing language. E.g “Versila” is adaptation of “Universe”, it also has this unique words connector to refer to: of, on, in, at, from, to, the. E.g “vi Avaga vi Posphora” which means “from Avaga to Posphora”, how we know which one is from and which one is to is the grammar rule. From always used at the beginning, it is impossible to say “to Posphora from Avaga” because the grammar rule says so. The language keeps evolving as I continue writing the book.

Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#26

Post by DanAndersen »

lazyjones wrote: post #19

I wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced gibberish for movies. We could preserve languages for posteriority and the result would be more realistic.

By that logic, movies should just use existing props or set designs rather than creating any new artifacts.

Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.

However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of the things that was great about, for example, the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).

Similarly, the video game Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."

Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#28

Post by DanAndersen »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #9
ggambetta wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that. But spending a lot of money on things that don't make it to the final cut always felt like a waste to me. I'm very very marginally into filmmaking (see bio), and I've always had the impression that costs and time could be cut drastically just with better planning. I often wonder what would happen if you applied startup principles to making a movie. Thinking in terms of MVP, customer value, efficiency, on…

you don't know what's gonna make the final cut though. Stuff like language creation is super early on in the process at which point you're trying to engineer a system for success. It makes sense because you don't know what you're gonna end up with and overshooting is better than missing.

Exactly -- that was part of the mindset behind Weta when they were working on the Lord of the Rings movies. They rejected the attitude of avoiding detail "because no one would see it anyway," because putting in that detail would then open up flexibility in terms of what shots could actually be done, because there was the confidence that whatever they made would hold up.

Re: Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)

#29

Post by da_chicken »

pablobaz wrote: post #27

An interesting anecdote is when the producers couldn't contact the language creator and had to make up a line on the spot. The language creator then back-fitted the made up gibberish into the language. http://www.dothraki.com/2012/06/hash-yer-ast-fin/

Er, wrong link?
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