Interviews: Ask David Peterson About Inventing Languages 87
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.
Are your languages web-scale? (Score:5, Funny)
Have you considered creating a thread-safe language which avoids buffer overflows? Do you think this would be made easier by making whitespace significant?
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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. (Score:4, Interesting)
Consistent inconsistencies (Score:2)
Even better, inconsistencies that can be traced to an earlier form of the language. For example, Spanish has some verbs where e becomes ie when accented and others where it doesn't. The verbs where ie appears are verbs that had a long e in Latin, and those where it does not had a short e.
Ob (Score:1)
I guess Americans have an advantage in that there's very little likelihood that they'll unconsciously put bits of an existing language in.
Hom (Score:2)
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qatlh Hol chenmoH, chonayta' chenmoHta' neHqu'.
Why create a language, something something you only married me?
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What's the point of grammar and syntax? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What's the point of grammar and syntax? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [imdb.com], 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?".
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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
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For example, can you tell which one is klingon and which one has the words jumbled around? Can you tell the difference?
vavlI’ quv Say’moHmeH nuj bIQ
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What some people refer to as "simplest grammar" is probably isolating morphology [wikipedia.org]. 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
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... from Tolkien to the latest Superman, the added depth of creating your own languages makes it seem more plausible and real than "booga booga".
Yup, about as plausible as hobbits and kryptonite. I can appreciate the desire to make fiction seem more realistic, but find it interesting how people can get pedantic about it.
Re: What's the point of grammar and syntax? (Score:1)
Swearing, double-entendres, puns ... (Score:2)
How do you decide to what extent a language will have less polite/more naughty aspects, and how do you decide what they are?
Almost every language will have some kind of swearing, or double-entendres, or other aspects which aren't purely syntactic.
Obviously a warrior race is going to have much more bawdy aspects to their language than a race of monks.
Surely delivering insults can be as integral to a language as merely conveying an idea.
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I'd love to see a language as (obviously) sleazy and duplicitous as Washington/Madison Avenue English. Something completely content-free, where the real meaning is 180 degrees out of phase to what's being said.
You haven't seen the presidential debates yet, have you?
Synthetic language decyphering game (Score:3)
Warum, wo es doch schon viel zu viele gibt? (Score:1)
Isn't it kind of perverse to create languages that people don't understand when the purpose of language is communication?
Why, while there are already too many around? (Score:2)
Not a Question... (Score:4, Interesting)
...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.
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Is this any different than "spaceship model designer" or "cinematographer" or the guys who designed the weapons used by Orcs in LOTR over at WETA?
If there's suddenly a lot of people trying to have authentic sounding languages in their films, there will be a market for people who have shown they can do it.
But it's probably linguists doing this thing who were already working that field. I doubt you'll suddenly start seeing "fake language designer" showing up as a major any time soon ... the market probably i
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A bit. Pretty much any SciFi or fantasy film is going to have those, but only a small minority bother with made-up languages.
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Just one question: (Score:3)
what's the point?
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Hmm. Deep.
Thoughts on an ideal or optimal language? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Language and culture (Score:1)
Languages are affected by the cultures they are used in. I think this is mostly a matter of vocabulary. In Japanese for instance, you would use a different word for 'brother' if it was your own brother as opposed to someone else's brother. In fact there are different words for older and younger brother. That says something about Japanese culture. Do you incorporate things in your languages that specifically reflect the cultures involved?
Esperanto, Sindarin, Drow (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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The biggest obstacle to Esperanto is way that zealots over-sell it. It is easier to learn than natural languages, but not effortless the way some would have you think.
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Even if all Esperanto speakers were "zealots" (in my experience, it's only a small percentage), how does that in any way present an "obstacle" to learning and using the language?
Mouth-frothing zealots, whether it's for Esperanto, Macs, or even Linux (though the last might be justifiable ;) ) tend to turn normal people off. If you annoy someone, they're much less receptive to what you're preaching about.
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The term "effortless" is a meaningless word used as an undefined quantifier. It functions as a qualifier to suggest a steep learning curve, without suggesting what that might mean; typically it acts as hyperbole.
I've heard quotes from 4 to 16 times as fast--25% down to 6.25% as much effort--to learn; I don't know how much I believe that, and can't test on myself because I learn more quickly than others (I'm attentive to information; it's a habit that enables me to learn faster, when I'm not being incredi
Exclusive rights to a language (Score:2)
Lojban is supposed to be unambiguous; I think Esperanto achieves that exactly as well, due to its grammatical structure
Justin Rye has some choice words about Esperanto [jbr.me.uk], including plenty of ambiguities and latent biases.
This leads to things like Solresol, Sindarin, and Klingon.
One of which is much older than the other two, which is important for the following reason: Tolkien's Elvish languages (Quenya, Sindarin), the Klingon languages of Star Trek (Klingonaase and tlhIngan Hol), and the language of the Drow in Forgotten Realms each exist to serve works associated with one copyright owner. Would a language be considered an uncopyrightable "useful artifact", much like a style of clot
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Esperanto's structure is by context of word form. It's essentially word salad, and the words have affixes telling you if they're subject, verb, or direct object; they can come in fairly arbitrary order within a clause. I prefer the rigid structure of Japanese (as well as its extreme contextuality), but I must admit Esperanto does a fair job of telling you what you're talking *about*.
I doubt you could claim copyright on a language. It's information, in a generalized form: claiming copyright to a languag
Oracle v. Google (Score:2)
Put these together and you get a fairly direct legal conclusion: information *about* a conlang isn't copyrighted, because it isn't created in form (textbooks, dictionaries) by the creator of the conlang
I just thought of a different legal theory that could be used to claim copyright in a constructed language. A language's lexicon is a set of names of things. In the API of a programming library, the set of functions is also a set of names of things. But in Oracle v. Google, a U.S. court of appeals upheld copyrightability of the "structure, sequence and organization" of the Java standard library's API on May 2014. (It remanded to the district court the question of whether copying said API for purposes of int
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That's a distinctly odd case. Such cases have appeared before court many times--notably Apple v. Microsoft--and the courts have frequently claimed interface is not copyrightable. This is the basis of UNIX, as Bell Labs was unable to sue anyone for implementing a UNIX interface or defining a POSIX standard.
I don't understand how "structure, sequence, and organization" is in any way separable from an API. An API *is* structure, sequence, and organization.
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Does that mean the more Trump's wig eats, the more it reproduces? That actually explains a lot.
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Why Does Defiance Suck So Badly?
Because it takes place in Missouri, not Ohio [wikipedia.org].
Why do all science fiction shows have to have rubber-faced characters?
Because they're cheap. (Source: "Rubber Forehead Aliens" on All The Tropes [allthetropes.org])
International Auxiliary Language (Score:3, Interesting)
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Oh, that's easy---same reasons as why pretty much everyone everywhere is learning English in addition to their native/national language.
(It's not because English is such a well-designed or easy-to-learn language...)
Yeah, the world languages tend to have military/economic clout. The day bumpy headed aliens come to Earth with phasers & dilithium is the day the Klingon language gains global importance.
Use of langauge outside of TV? (Score:2)
Certain crated languages enjoy at least a limited amount of usage outside of their original contexts, with two obvious examples being Klingon and Tolkien's family of elvish languages. Do your foresee any of the languages you've created thus far being used outside of their respective TV series?
"Robust" artificial Languages (Score:3)
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I doubt very much that ordinary Roman citizens ... corrected each other's grammar.
Wrong you are [youtube.com]
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Linguists record people talking and count the mistakes - people almost never make mistakes of grammar.
Frequency of grammar errors (Score:2)
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What if 'alien' languages were in fact human?
Film-maker needs a location. With a local township's blessing, all the extras in the film speak an authentic human endangered language and the language is thus preserved on film.
For example, a low-budget British movie might have the following in the end credits,
"Portions of this film were filmed on location on the Isle of Man. The 'Kpukrab' language heard throughout the movie is actually Manx, a Celtic language that went extinct back in 1974 but has since been un
Productions lose money (Score:2)
and 5% of the profits of this production will be donated to further these efforts
Productions lose money. Studios make money by overcharging productions for distribution and promotion.
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Is that anything like iljena [frathwiki.com], where the noun is a set of consonants and the verb is a set of vowels that overlay it?
Making English more alien with hexadecimal (Score:2)
On a related note, I've tried coming up with English words for hexadecimal, with words for ten through fifteen starting with A through F, to represent a culture that counts in base sixteen. This way I can represent the convention of translating the viewpoint character's language [allthetropes.org] while still retaining some of the local color. (A base 20 culture would use "score" notation.) These are what I have so far:
Families of languages (Score:2)
One of the things which distinguishes Tolkien languages from most other fictional languages is that they have a history. Tolkien didn't just construct some languages, he also developed dialects and plausible etymology relationships. Did you try to take this into account in any of your languages, and if so, how successful do you think it was?
Inhuman Languages? (Score:1)
Question (Score:2)
o1D 7EÃ 812#P7E2 ezD1+ w#yN1 `C 8zN`B1FÃZ nÃyN 9r#Ã 1`N 2eV5%Ã weV7NÃ y71Gx%P `C jx#P`Mx#ÃÃ ?
An Introduction to Elvish (Score:2)
I first read "An Introduction to Elvish" (http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/An_Introduction_to_Elvish) some twenty years ago, and I was astonished to learn the detail behind Tolkein's language work, in particular the history of the language, and the theory behind its evolution. When inventing a language, how much do you consider its development - not as its creator, but as a person observing its changes throughout time?
Extinct or Endangered Languages (Score:1)