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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)

#51

Post by Kalium »

princeb wrote: post #44

I don't read a lot of books with invented languages, but a number that I've seen seem somewhat European. I don't remember very many Sinitic constructed languages. I think that would be nice, but the nature of the language conveys information about the culture and the society that speaks it. a reader would naturally see a Sinitic language and picture a culture that is Sinitic, even if the author did not intend it that…

I think a lot of authors use a conlang to add a touch of the exotic to their work, but also try to keep it from being too unfamiliar. A confused reader is generally one who has been knocked out of the narrative flow.

I've read SF works in which light-based and even scent-based languages are posited. Authors don't always use this as anything other than background color in their universe, though.

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

#53

Post by l9k »

icebraining wrote: post #20
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.

And be accused of cultural appropriation?

Why not just work with the few last speakers / experts on the culture and language so that it's not offensive?

A lot of those people are proud of their language and would like to see it live and thrive again.

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

#54

Post by thfuran »

princeb wrote: post #44

I don't read a lot of books with invented languages, but a number that I've seen seem somewhat European. I don't remember very many Sinitic constructed languages. I think that would be nice, but the nature of the language conveys information about the culture and the society that speaks it. a reader would naturally see a Sinitic language and picture a culture that is Sinitic, even if the author did not intend it that…

Pandora's Star has a species that communicates by luminescence outside the (human) visible spectrum.

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

#55

Post by projektir »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #40
DominikD wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would not be preserving anything, you'd be stomping on a culture. Old and lesser known languages are rarely well researched. You're lucky if you have morphosyntax written down. But the moment you start using existing language in a new context, you get into issues. You've got words and whole concepts missing that you have to add to something that's more or less complete. Dothraki needs horse-related words. You nee…

It might encourage a few people to learn the real language spoken in the movie instead of a conlang which nobody ever spoke outside the movie. The time and effort expended by Star Trek fans learning Klingon might be better spent learning Basque, Cornish, Abkhaz, Etruscan, or Sumerian. They'd learn a language with speakers and/or literature, and if the language is still spoken contribute to its continuity.

This seems to be one of those "why don't you just be productive?" arguments, which tends to miss the point of why someone did something to begin with. There's a reason Star Trek fans learn Klingon and not a real language, they're fascinated with Klingons but not a real culture, so the energy to learn, say, Basque, was never there to begin with.

I feel similar with history, if I am just doing it for entertainment I'd much rather learn a constructed history rather than the real one.

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

#56

Post by jdmichal »

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'll just refer you to the relevant /r/conlangs discussion on this, rather than repeat the same arguments back to you:

https://reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8wjs73/is_there_a_cit...

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

#57

Post by jdmichal »

mihaifm wrote: post #24
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 Ubi…

The movie Prometheus was also somewhat famous in linguistics circles for attempting to use either reconstructed PIE directly or potentially a modified proto-Sanskrit for the Engineer.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008

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

#58

Post by zhengyi13 »

princeb wrote: post #44

I don't read a lot of books with invented languages, but a number that I've seen seem somewhat European. I don't remember very many Sinitic constructed languages. I think that would be nice, but the nature of the language conveys information about the culture and the society that speaks it. a reader would naturally see a Sinitic language and picture a culture that is Sinitic, even if the author did not intend it that…

I don't recall anything Sinitic either, but it's not all an Indo-European game, at least :)

Khuzdul (the Dwarves' language in The Lord Of The Rings) is not well fleshed out, but was somewhat inspired by Semitic languages, in so far as it had tri-consonantal roots.

Klingon was created by a guy well versed in Native American language, and I think I recall reading was somewhat inspired by Inuit's agglutinative grammar.

Oh, and Laadan, an attempt at a conciously different perspective in language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Láadan

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

#59

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

fusiongyro wrote: post #48
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Tu” is also "you" in Hindi.

These are all Indo-European languages; English once had forms of "you" like this: thou/thee.

As the singular, with you/ye as the plural. (Then later you was used as the formal form with thou as the familiar, like French's tu vs vous, and then later the informal thou/thee fell out of the use. [And new plural forms were innovated, e.g. youse, y'all etc.])

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

#60

Post by gbrown »

adityapurwa wrote: post #25

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 word…

As I understand things (not a linguist), that's not actually a different language than English, though it's a neat exercise. The English language has undergone all sorts of pronunciation shifts over time, it seems like you've imposed a new pronunciation map on an existing language, but the grammatical structure should be preserved.
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