Dothraki language From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search

DothrakiPronunciation ˈd o.θɾa.ki

Created by George R. R. Martin, David J. Peterson

Date from 2009

Setting and usage A Song of Ice and Fire, 2011 series Game of Thrones

Users Fictional language, zero speakers.  (date missing)

Purpose

constructed languages

artistic languages o fictional languages Dothraki

Sources constructed languages a priori languages

Language codesISO 639-2 art

ISO 639-3 –

This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

The Dothraki language is the constructed language of the Dothraki, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dothraki Sea in the series A Song of Ice and Fire written by George R. R. Martin. It was created by David J. Peterson, a member of the Language Creation Society, for HBO's television series Game of Thrones. Dothraki was designed to fit George R. R. Martin's original conception of the language, based upon the few extant phrases and words in his original books.

As of 21 September 2011, there were 3,163 created words in the lexicon,[1] though far from all words are known to the public. However, there is a growing community of Dothraki language fans, with websites like "Learn Dothraki"[2] offering information on the state of the language.

Contents [hide] 

1 Development o 1.1 Language constraints

2 Phonology and romanization o 2.1 Consonants o 2.2 Vowels

3 Grammar o 3.1 Word Order

4 Sample 5 References 6 External links

[edit] DevelopmentThe Dothraki vocabulary was created by Peterson well in advance of the adaptation. HBO hired the Language Creation Society to create the language, and after an application process involving over thirty conlangers, David Peterson was chosen to develop the Dothraki language. He delivered over 1700 words to HBO before the initial shooting. Peterson drew inspiration from George R.R. Martin’s description of the language, as well as from such languages as Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili.[3]

[edit] Language constraints

The Dothraki language was developed under two significant constraints. First, the language had to match the uses already put down in the books. Secondly, it had to be easily pronounceable or learnable by the actors. These two constraints influenced the grammar and phonology of the language: for instance, voiceless stops can be aspirated or unaspirated, as in English.

[edit] Phonology and romanizationDavid Peterson has said that "You know, most people probably don’t really know what Arabic actually sounds like, so to an untrained ear, it might sound like Arabic. To someone who knows Arabic, it doesn’t. I tend to think of the sound as a mix between Arabic (minus the distinctive pharyngeals) and Spanish, due to the dental consonants."[4]

Regarding the orthography, the Dothraki themselves don't have a writing system—nor do many of the surrounding peoples (e.g. the Lhazareen). If there were to be any written examples of Dothraki in the A Song of Ice and Fire universe, it would be in a writing system developed in the Free Cities and adapted to Dothraki, or in some place like Ghis or Qarth, which do have writing systems.[5]

[edit] Consonants

There are twenty-three consonant phonemes in the Dothraki language. Here the romanized form is given on the left, and the IPA in brackets.

Labial Dental Alveolar Postalveolar Velar Uvular GlottalPlosive t [t ] k [k] q [q]

Voiced plosive d [d ] g [ɡ]Affricate ch [tʃ]

Voiced affricate j [dʒ]Voiceless fricative f [f] th [θ] s [s] sh [ʃ] kh [x] h [h]Voiced fricative v [v] z [z] zh [ʒ]

Nasal m [m] n [n ]Lateral l [l ]

Trill r [r]Tap r [ɾ]

Glide w [w] y [j]

The digraphs kh, sh, th and zh are all fricatives, while ch and j are affricates.

The letters c and x never appear in Dothraki, although c appears in the digraph ch, pronounced like 'check'. b and p seem to appear only in names, as in Bharbo and Pono.

Voiceless stops may be aspirated. This does not change word meaning.

[edit] Vowels

Dothraki has a four vowel system shown below:

Vowels Diphthongsi [i] iy [ij]e [e] ey [ej]o [o] oy [oj]a [a] ay [aj]

In the A Song of Ice and Fire books, u never occurs as a vowel, appearing only after "q", and only in names, as in Jhiqui and Quaro.

In sequence of multiple vowels, each such vowel represents a separate syllable. Examples: shierak [ʃi.e.'ɾak] star, rhaesh [ɾha.'eʃ] country, khaleesi ['xa.le.e.si] queen.

[edit] GrammarBasic word order is SVO: subject comes first, then verb and lastly object. In a noun phrase demonstratives come first, but adjectives, possessor and prepositional phrases all follow the

noun. Though prepositions are also sometimes employed, the language is foremost inflectional. Prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes are all used. Verbs conjugate in infinite, past, present, future, two imperatives and (archaic) participle; they also agree with person, number and polarity. Nouns divide into two classes, inanimate and animate. They decline in five cases, nominative, accusative, genitive, allative and ablative. Animate nouns also decline according to number.[6][7]

[edit] Word Order

In a basic sentence, the order of these elements (when all three are present) is as in English: First comes the Subject (S), then comes the Verb (V), then comes the Object (O). Here's an example:

Khal ahhas arakh.The Khal (S) sharpened (V) the arakh (O).

When only a subject is a present, the subject precedes the verb, as it does in English:

Arakh hasa.The arakh (S) is sharp (V).

In noun phrases there is a specific order as well. The order is as follows: demonstrative, noun, adverb, adjective, genitive noun, prepositional phrase. Prepositions always precede their noun complements.

jin ave sekke verven anni m'orvikoonthis father very violent of.mine with.a.whipthis very violent father of mine with a whip

Adverbs normally are sentence final, but they can also immediately follow the verb. Modal particles precede the verb.[6]

[edit] SampleNevakhi vekha ha maan: Rekke, m'aresakea norethi fitte./ˈn evaxi ˈvexa ha maˈan ˈrekke ˈmaɾesakea ˈnoɾeθi ˈfit te/seat.GEN exist.3SG.PRES for 3SG.ALL there.ACC with.coward.ALL.PL hair.GEN shortThere is a place for him: There, with the short-haired cowards.[8]

[edit] References1. "The Header Script". 2011-09-21. Retrieved 2011-10-03.2. "Lekh". Dothraki. 2011-04-05. Retrieved 2011-05-11.3. "Official HBO Press Release". April 12, 2010.4. "Creating Dothraki - An Interview with David J Peterson and Sai Emrys". April 22,

2010.

5. "Westeros.Ru interview". June 24, 2010.6. ^ a b "Dothraki 101 post on HBO's Making Game of Throne's blog". December 15, 2010.7. "Dothraki presentation at Language Creation Conference 4". August 22, 2011.8. "Dothraki Presentation at WorldCon 2011". August 21, 2011.

[edit] External links The official Dothraki blog The LCS blog about the language The Dothraki Language Wiki

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DothrakiLekh Dothraki

HomeWelcome to Dothraki.org! We are an unofficial fan-site for the Dothraki Language, used in George R.R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. HBO has just finished showing the first season of an ongoing series called Game of Thrones, and they hired David Peterson of the Language Creation Society (LCS) to make a full language out of the small snippets used in the books. This site is dedicated towards being the official home of that language community around Dothraki. We hope to be the fan base for it, allowing fans to learn, document, and speak it

together, just as on our sister site, LearnNavi.org. We’re in contact with the LCS, but we’re not officially a part of them – everything here is for fans, by fans.

Dothraki is the language of the nomadic horse warriors who populate the Dothraki Sea: a vast grass plain in the center of the continent of Essos, which lies to the east of Westeros, across the Narrow Sea. Their language differs greatly from the Common Tongue of Westeros and the languages of the Free Cities, which descend from High Valyrian. For more, check the wiki, or watch our YouTube channel, or better yet, read the books. For a description of the language itself, you’ll find no better place to start looking than here.

Learning Dothraki?If you are interested in learning to speak Dothraki then the place for you to start is at our starting platform in the Dothraki wiki: http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Learningdothraki This wiki is still under construction but more information is added continuously.

Resources The Unofficial Dothraki Dictionary (Updated frequently) Dothraki Language wiki Dothraki.org Forum Dothraki IRC Chat Dothraki Wiki in a PDF Document

January 27, 2011 | Comments Closed

Tweets

o RT @cnnthenextlist: Deconstructing #Dothraki! http://t.co/sWIhckRj @ClarkeEmilia tells us who's the best speaker. @LearnDothraki @SeanBe ... 04:37:13 AM March 23, 2012 from Twitter for Mac

o (delay) David J. Peterson is doing an AMA:... http://t.co/FCL3RFq8 09:02:51 PM March 22, 2012 from Facebook

o RT @ilengua: Davis Petersons (creator #Dothraki) rich lecture at Language Creation Conference: http://t.co/bxIUoogL @LearnDothraki @Ling ... 12:33:10 AM March 15, 2012 from Twitter for Mac

o Dothraki Presentations at SWTX PCA/ACA! http://t.co/ACehdLy4 http://t.co/w2RamRYp 03:22:52 AM February 02, 2012 from Facebook

o RT @LearnValyrian: So, who's fluent in Valyrian yet? 10:54:08 PM January 30, 2012 from Twitter for Mac

Dothraki.org is the place to learn the Dothraki Language. Dothraki is spoken by the Dothraki people, a nomadic war-mongering race that ride the aptly-named Dothraki Sea steppes in George R.R. Martin's series, A Song of Ice and Fire. It was created by David Peterson, of the Language Creation Society, for the HBO adaptation of the series "A Game of Thrones". Site by Sebastian Wolff and others.

http://www.dothraki.org/

Shierak Qiya JadaMar 31

Posted by David J. Peterson

Indeed, season 2 (or series 2, depending on where you’re reading this from) is nearly upon us. This is a small announcement to let regular readers know that during the season I’m going to move away from the regular Dothraki qua Dothraki posts and write up responses to and commentaries on the episodes as we move through the second season (once it’s aired somewhere in the world, the spoiler curtain has lifted. Me nem nesa). Of course, since this is the Dothraki blog, I’ll be focusing on how a given episode relates to the Dothraki language and culture, and I’ll also discuss the Dothraki lines in each episode.

Before moving on, though, I’ve a bit of business to take care of. Last week I did an AMA over at Reddit (you can see the whole thing here), and redditor dopaminer asked the following:

Have you received requests from friends to make their names sound like the word for “awesome” or anything like that? (PS, if you still need to some up with a word for awesome, can it have the sound “rachel” in it?)

Of course, Dothraki has a word for “awesome” (vezhven), but I said I’d come up with something, and I have.

When it comes to flora and fauna vocabulary, I try to research what the Dothraki Sea might be like, but as you read through the Song of Ice and Fire series, George R. R. Martin’s always throwing wild cards in. I’ve tried to come up with words for all the animals that the Dothraki encounter, and a good percentage of those they would likely encounter (e.g. animals around Slaver’s Bay and surrounding environs). We’ve already seen (and, indeed, already had a word for) the mighty lion, hrakkar, but in A Dance with Dragons we were introduced to the city of Volantis, where there are two major political parties: The Elephants and the Tigers. We’d seen elephants before (or at least in cyvasse), but this was, to my knowledge, the first mention of tigers (or tiger cloaks, for that matter). As it seems only right that the Dothraki would come up with their own words for the mightiest of beasts, “tiger” is a good candidate for a new stem.

While most animate nouns that aren’t humans end in a vowel, there are a number of beast words that are disyllabic and end in a consonant—to wit:

hrakkar “lion” noah “bull” qlaseh “deer (archaic)” hlizif “bear” kolver “eagle”

And, since tigers are awesome, it seems only fitting to add a new one to the list:

rachel “tiger”

There you go, dopaminer! The word is, of course, stressed on the second syllable, and the vowels are different (and the consonants, a bit), but romanized, you can see the resemblance. And, hey, now we’ve got half of the Volantine political factions in Dothraki! Racheli Volanti. I like it. Now we just need “elephant”…

To everyone else, let the countdown begin! I’ve seen the first episode, and it was damn good. I think everyone will be pleased. Fonas chek!

(Oh, and regarding the featured post, I didn’t have any tiger pictures, so that’s, uh…a murloc. That’s close, right?)

 

Posted in Announcements, Vocabulary

1 Comment

Tags: responses

Game of Thrones Season 2 Premiere EventMar 28

Posted by David J. Peterson

Tonight I went to the season 2 cast and crew premiere event for Game of Thrones in LA. It’s a great venue (the Ray Kurtzman Theater at CAA), of course, and a fun time out, but it’s also nice

to see people I mainly communicate with via e-mail face to face—though, as usual, I forgot to get pictures. However, you can see Bryan Cogman in this shot:

Last time we saw the first two episodes of season 1; this time we just the first episode of season 2. But…man! These guys do good work. I won’t give anything away, but one thing viewers will notice at the very beginning: Peter Dinklage’s name has moved on up to the east side, as it were (when the first episode airs, compare it to the season 1 intro). Granted, some of the names that were ahead of his aren’t around any longer, but nonetheless, it’s well-deserved!

After the screening was over, there was an after party, and as I was waiting to get my car, I finally had a chance to chat face-to-face with the man himself, khali khali (or perhaps khal khaloa?), zhey Drogo: Jason Momoa.

So, I knew Jason Momoa was buff; we’ve seen that. I don’t think I fully appreciated just how tall he was. Check out this photo:

http://www.dothraki.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/IMG_5009.jpg

And hes’ not even standing up tall! Bet that dude could dunk if he put his mind to it. After that one, he said we should make angry, Drogo faces. The result:

http://www.dothraki.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/IMG_5011.jpg

It’s an iPhone camera, so we looked at the picture afterwards, and Jason’s exact words were, “Dude, you look constipated!” Yeah… Oops! Truth is, I just couldn’t do an angry face, because I was so floored to be meeting and talking to Lisa Bonet (i.e. Denise). I mean, I grew up with The Cosby Show: That family feels like they’re real to me! I didn’t say anything (after all, every one of the main cast members has heard every comment and question in the world about The Cosby Show ten billion times over), but I couldn’t keep my face from smiling.

At the after party at The Eveleigh, there was legitimate full-course dinner food there, as well as appetizers (which I was grateful for, since I hadn’t eaten much that day). Here’s what I had:

http://www.dothraki.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/IMG_5012.jpg

See how red that meat is?! Man, that was good! So that got me to thinking: How would you characterize rare vs. well-done meat in Dothraki? Not an easy question. In my experience, those who live in the Midwest (of America) on farms and actually have a hand in the whole food preparation process only eat well-done meat. Ask for something rare in their presence, and they’ll give you a look like you just stepped out of a chicken. (Think about that one for a minute.)

While the Dothraki are preparing their own meat, I can’t help but think they wouldn’t share this prohibition (I wanted to say superstition, but I’m sure farm people have good reasons for distrusting rare meat [and I'm sure I don't want to know what those reasons are]). After all, they have pregnant women eat a raw horse’s heart which has just been ripped from a live horse’s body—and they think this will help the fetus, as opposed to lead to salmonella, or something. So “raw” probably isn’t the word for it.

Looking over the vocabulary, I already have words that I think will cover one scale—both vegetation and meat:

chosh “fresh” ~ rikh “rotten”

This is one scale (the “how likely is this to be bad?” scale), and I think it works fine for meat. So chosh can cover “raw” or “rare”, depending on the circumstance. In addition to this, though, there’s also the heating scale. Given what we see of the Dothraki, it doesn’t seem to me like they’ve invested a lot in slow-cooking or baking: it’s probably burnt or not burnt. Given those two extremes, going by the color of the meat seems like a good way to characterize the meat:

virzeth “red” ~ kazga “black”

So if you ever get a Dothraki waiter, you’ve got two options: che gavat virzeth che gavat kazga. And to me it seems likely that, in the world of Dothraki cuisine (to the extent that that phrase even makes sense), it’s not the case that there’s a dish and you decide how “done” you like your meat—rather, there are dishes where the meat will be virzeth, and dishes where the meat will be kazga, and switching them doesn’t make sense (like if you ordered chicken parmigiana and you got steak parmigiana instead of chicken: it’s just a different dish). That’s my read. What do you think? (Actually, I wonder what they’d think over at The Inn at the Crossroads…)

 

Posted in Vocabulary

11 Comments

Tags: color, food, lol, misc

Developing CanonMar 18

Posted by David J. Peterson

As we’re approaching the April 1st premiere of season 2 of Game of Thrones, I thought it’d be worthwhile to take a look back at the early days of Dothraki.

To start us off, let’s take a look at the Dothraki that existed in the books before I took a crack at it. Step number one was deciding how the words in the books would (and/or could and/or should) be pronounced. I came up with a solution (summarized here), but it wasn’t without controversy. In analyzing the words in the books, I held to the following principles:

1. The spellings in the books are canon.2. Different spelling = different sound.3. The resultant phonology should be linguistically sound.4. The resultant phonology shouldn’t be too difficult for an English-speaking actor to

pronounce.

As a result of the above, the hr in hranna is pronounced differently from the rh in rhaggat, and so forth. There were a couple of changes I made, though, and they’re worth discussing. One minor one was a spelling change that can be illustrated nicely with one name: Jhiqui.

That’s how her name is spelled in the book. I didn’t quite know what to make of jh when I first saw it. It contrasts with j by itself (consider haj and Jommo), which means that jh should be a different sound from j. Since the “h” in English tends to make stops into fricatives (cf. “t” > “th”) and move the place of fricatives towards the palate (cf. “s” > “sh”), I thought it’d be reasonable to assume that jh stood for a voiced palato-alveolar fricative ([ʒ], like the “z” in “azure”). I may have been influenced by the fact that [ʒ] is my favorite sound, but I still think the supposition is a reasonable one.

Anyway, this is where I made a decision. Since jh is rather a bizarre digraph, I decided to change the spelling to zh. I’ve always thought that that was the best way to represent the sound to an English speaker, because it fits this analogy:

s : sh :: z : zh

That, however, has not proved to be the case. Not only did some of the actors have trouble with zh (often pronouncing it as if it were z), but I’ve also heard from others that zh is problematic.

There are two reasons I can think of that an English speaker wouldn’t do well with zh for [ʒ]: One, they don’t know how the digraph ought to be pronounced (at a glance), or two, they misinterpret it as a sequence of z and h.

At the heart of both problems, I believe, is the nebulous nature of the phoneme [ʒ] in English. There are no minimal pairs (or at least no common ones. Perhaps if someone knows of one, they can leave a comment), but there are near minimal pairs in “pleasure” and “pressure”. (Ooh… Actually, what about “azure” and “asher”?) Additionally, there is no systematic way to spell the sound. It appears as “ge” in “rouge”, “g” in “genre”, “s” in “leisure”, “si” in “fusion”, “z” in “azure”, “j” in “Taj Mahal”, and part of “x” in “luxury”. English has a funky spelling system, but for just about every other consonant phoneme, there is a definite, basic spelling. Not so with [ʒ].

Daenerys has suggested that it’s more difficult to get zh right before a and o; less so before i and e. This makes intuitive sense because zh is a palatal sound, and i and e are front vowels. She suggested that zh might be spelled zhy, but perhaps just in front of a and o—which does make sense. I’d thought previously of spelling the sound zy. For the sake of neatness, though, I’d want to respell what is now spelled as sh as sy, which doesn’t seem ideal… As a result, I think we’re stuck with zh.

Anyway, the whole point of bringing this up is that I decided to respell jh as zh (thought it’d be easier. Oh well). This doesn’t mean, though, that the spellings in the books ought to change. Since it’s a one-to-one correspondence, jh is just the book’s way of spelling Dothraki zh (or vice-versa). This means that if anything from modern Dothraki with zh shows up in the books, it would be spelled with jh, e.g. jhavvorsa, mahrajh, vejhven, etc.

Oh, and also present in Jhiqui’s name is the change from qu to kw, which shouldn’t be too controversial. Beyond that, though, I made a couple of other changes which are worth noting.

The letters p and b occur almost nowhere in Dothraki. In fact they only appear in two places: In the names Pono and Bharbo. Given the sound change I proposed (a merger of older p and f as well as b and v), it seemed reasonable enough to have them survive only in names. As the Havazh Dothraki is large, it seems reasonable to assume that there are probably several different varieties of Dothraki spoken by different khalasars. They’re probably mutually intelligible (being able to communicate in Vaes Dothrak is motivation enough to maintain communicability), but it seems likely that some varieties may have preserved the p/f and b/v distinctions, meaning that this is a dialectal variation that Dothraki speakers everywhere are likely aware of (kind of like the t/k distinction in Hawaiian).

While for the most part the schema I came up with above worked out pretty well, there were a couple places where it may have caused more problems than it solved. One obvious one is the word khaleesi. Going by Dothraki’s spelling system, the word should be pronounced [ˈxa.le.e.si] (or KHA-lay-yay-see). More often than not, though, it’s pronounced [ka.ˈli.si] (or kah-LEE-see). There’s not much to say about the [k] and the stress (bound to happen), but the “ee” part is troubling. It seems quite sensible that any English speaker would pronounce the “ee” as if it were like the “ee” in “keep” or “seem”. What wasn’t sensible, perhaps, was my idea that it wouldn’t be any trouble to switch over to the “real” Dothraki pronunciation (i.e. pronouncing it just like

it’s spelled). Evidently they made an executive decision on the show to pronounce it like the “ee” in “keep” even when it’s spoken in Dothraki. And I suppose I can’t blame them. It does seem reasonable enough. If I had it to do over, perhaps I would’ve bent the rules just a little bit and made the official spelling khalisi—or maybe even khalissi to get the stress right. Oh well. Live and learn.

One I’ve mentioned before elsewhere (but not here, I believe) is George R. R. Martin’s peculiar pronunciation of the word “Dothraki”. Those who have seen him in person know how he pronounces it, but if you haven’t, he pronounces the last “i” as if it were like the “i” in “bike” or “fungi” or “alumni”. I was shocked the first time I heard it. I thought I simply misheard him, but no: His pronunciation is consistent on this point. It does certainly change the character and flavor of the word quite a bit. As far as I know, though, he’s the only one that pronounces the word this way, so I didn’t feel too bad about giving it the usual “ee” pronunciation.

Finally, there’s the issue of the vowel sequence ae. I honestly had no idea what to do with this. I thought I’d be well served in treating the two as separate vowels (as in Spanish “caer”). It seems, though, that the preferred pronunciation is like the “a” in “gate”. Aside from the variant of “Rachel” spelled “Raechel”, I don’t think we have that sequence pronounced that way in English, so I’m not sure if I would’ve guessed that that was how it was “supposed” to be pronounced. On the show, most of the time they went with standard Dothraki pronunciation. The one major time where they didn’t was with the pronunciation of the name “Rhaego”. That, however, is Dany’s old brother’s name (Rhaegar) with a Dothraki -o added in place of the Valyrian -ar, so it’s not too bizarre that the spelling has a different pronunciation (it’s not a true Dothraki name, after all).

Well, I had intended all of this to be rather the introduction to a longer post. The word count thingy at the bottom of this post tells me I’m up over 1400 words already, though, so I suppose I’d better bring this to a close. I’ll likely revisit this topic some time in the future, though, as there’s more to be said. Until then, fonas chek!

 

Posted in Conlanging

5 Comments

Tags: detailed, etymology, misc, writing

Dothraki in ArabicMar 7

Posted by David J. Peterson

Taking a break from grammar, I thought I’d write up a little guide about how to write Dothraki using the Arabic script. It’s actually mostly written up, so all I have to do is transfer it over to the blog (heh, heh…).

Of course, one might wonder: Why would I already have a guide for transcribing Dothraki using the Arabic script? For that, we have to go way back to the days before the Game of Thrones pilot was filmed. Back then, I think the general feeling was that the show would be picked up for at least one season (it wasn’t official, of course, but we all kind of had a gut feeling), and at the time (back when Daenerys was being played by Tamzin Merchant), the Dothraki scenes were all being shot in Morocco—and I, at least, thought they would continue to be shot in Morocco.

In Hollywood, though, radical sweeping changes can happen overnight, and soon Tamzin Merchant was replaced by Emilia Clarke, and Morocco itself was replaced by Malta, and the rest is history. During the Morocco days, though, the word was that many Dothraki extras would likely be Moroccan, meaning they might know French, and would likely know Arabic, but might not know English. Since the Dothraki romanization was designed with English speakers in mind, I decided it would make sense to devise a French-inspired romanization system, as well as one utilizing the Arabic script. I detailed both of these systems in the original materials I sent to Dave and Dan. I’ll probably write up the French romanization system I came up with later, but for now, let’s take a look at the Arabic system.

First, some important facts about Arabic writing. The system is, technically (as it’s used today), an alphabet, but it began its existence as an abjad. An abjad is a writing system that treats vowels as incidental, encoding only the consonants. Thus, in an Arabic word like kataba, “he wrote”, you generally write the equivalent of ktb, with the vowels being assumed. As it is now, there are certain vowels that must be written (long vowels), and there’s a secondary set of diacritics that can be used to optionally write all vowels, so it really looks more like an alphabet, but it’s abjadic history is evident to any who use the script.

Unlike most Western scripts, the Arabic script is written from right to left (which is a nightmare if you want to drop a word of Arabic into a predominantly English text, let me tell you), and most of the characters connect to one another (as with cursive writing in English). It’s also, in my opinion, gorgeous. I fell in love with the Arabic script the first time I saw it, and am glad to have had the opportunity to learn the language and use the script (also is useful to be able to read it).

Anyway, for those who love great big tables, you’re in for a treat! Here’s the full system for rendering Dothraki in Arabic (note: for diacritic vowels, I’m using Arabic د [d] as the bearer below; romanized forms with an asterisk are non-standard. I’ve also enlarged the font size of the Arabic a little bit so the characters are easier to see):

Arabic Transcription of DothrakiRomanized Form IPA Transcription Arabic TranscriptionA, a [a] ا , , ۃ د�

B, b* [b] بCh, ch [tʃ] چD, d [d] �E, e [e] ا , , ۃ د�F, f [f] فG, g [g] ݣH, h [h] حI, i [i] يJ, j [dʒ] جK, k [k] كKh, kh [x] خL, l [l] لM, m [m] مN, n [n] نO, o [o] وP, p* [p] پQ, q [q] قR, r [ɾ] رS, s [s] سSh, sh [ʃ] شT, t [t] تTh, th [θ] ثV, v [v] ڤW, w [w] وY, y [j] يZ, z [z] زZh, zh [ʒ] ژ

Many of the choices above are (as anyone who reads Arabic will probably immediately recognize) not uncontroversial. It is nice, though, that Arabic has dedicated letters for q and th, which are often difficult for native, real world orthographies to represent. A summary of the reasoning behind some of the decisions made above is below:

I’ve completed conflated a and e. It’s difficult to distinguish between the two in the Arabic script, frankly. Apart from introducing a new letter (or, perhaps, using the diphthong ي), though, there isn’t much to be done. I’d be open to suggestions. (Note: I’d originally used a kasra diacritic for e, but decided against it, as it seemed unnatural.)

As in Arabic, there’s no distinction between y and i. One choice I made was to mirror that with w and o (in Arabic, w and u). The character و is often used for o in borrowings (e.g.

is always pronounced [o] و diploma”), so I figure all it would take is a note that“ دبلومwhen used as a vowel, and Arabic speakers would get it right.

It was quite tempting to render zh as ج, but most speakers actually have something closer to j for that, so I resorted to using a non-standard character ژ, which I hoped would be recognizable.

Arabic speakers will notice that I used ح rather than ه for h, even though the latter is closer to the Dothraki h in most places. The reason is (thinking back to the actual Moroccan extras, remember), I was hoping they’d actually use the Arabic sound ح which I thought would be too difficult for English-speaking actors. I’d always imagined that sound in particular when creating and working with Dothraki.

The character گ is the one I see most often for g (probably because it’s used in Farsi), but my brother-in-law, who’s been to Morocco, said they use ݣ, so I went with that.

Of course, as with Arabic, gemination is indicated with a shadda above the consonant in question. It looks like a little w (د).

Now with that all the way, let’s see it in action! Here’s a Dothraki sentence in the romanization, then in the Arabic script, then translated:

Hash yer vineseri dothrakh ataki kishi, zhey shekh ma shieraki anni? اني؟ ركي شي ما شخ ژي كيشي، آتكي دوثراخ ڤينسري ير حاش “Do you remember our first ride, my sun and stars?”

Ha! That was so much fun. I realize I may be the only one who appreciates this, but despite the vowel clusters of Dothraki, I always imagined it written in the Arabic script. Even though it’s a pain in the choyo to write it out using Unicode, it’s fun to see it on the screen.

Thanks for indulging me!

 

Posted in Conlanging

10 Comments

Tags: calligraphy, misc, writing

DemonstrativesFeb 28

Posted by David J. Peterson

In some of our IRC chats, Qvaak has asked me to go over demonstratives in Dothraki, so I’ll aim to do that today.

A demonstrative is a word like “this” that’s used in front of nouns or noun phrases. In English, we have these four common demonstratives:

Give me this book. (Nearby, Singular) Give me that book. (Not Nearby, Singular) Give me these books. (Nearby, Plural) Give me those books. (Not Nearby, Plural)

Notice that the plural demonstratives above agree with the noun in plurality, but don’t actually mark plurality (i.e. you can’t say “Give me those book”). With that in mind, though, the English demonstratives encode two properties: number (singular vs. plural), and distance (nearby vs. not nearby).

In English, you may also use the demonstratives by themselves as demonstrative pronouns. They look just the same and can be used without nouns. The sentence above, then, would look like this:

Give me this. (Nearby, Singular) Give me that. (Not Nearby, Singular) Give me these. (Nearby, Plural) Give me those. (Not Nearby, Plural)

Dothraki demonstratives, as modifiers, encode only one property: distance. Unlike English (but like many, many natural languages), Dothraki distinguishes three different distances: near to the speaker, near to the addressee, and near to neither. Demonstrative modifiers in Dothraki different from adjectival modifiers in that they precede the nouns they modify, rather than follow them. Using arakh instead of “book”, here are some sentences illustrating the distinctions made in Dothraki:

Azhas anhaan jin arakh. “Give me this arakh.” (Near Speaker) Azhas anhaan haz arakh. “Give me that arakh.” (Near Addressee) Azhas anhaan rek arakh. “Give me that arakh.” (Near Neither)

Note that the form of the demonstrative doesn’t change regardless of the plurality of the the noun, as shown below:

Anha tih rek hrakkares. “I saw that lion.” Anha tih rek hrakkaris. “I saw those lions.”

If you want to use the demonstratives by themselves as stand-alone pronouns, however, the forms do change, unlike in English. Basically, in order to use a demonstrative as a pronoun, one needs to know the animacy of the intended referent. The demonstrative then declines as a noun would that matched in animacy. The animate form for each demonstrative pronoun adds -ak to the end of the demonstrative in the nominative, and the inanimate adds an -i. The animate forms decline like any consonant-final animate noun, and the inanimate form declines like the relative pronoun fini (its declension is shown here). Below are some examples:

Hazi zhokwae. “That (thing) is big.” Azhas rek anhaan. “Give that (thing) to me.” Azhas mae hazakaan. “Give it to that (one).” Jinak simon anni. “This is my uncle.”

Notice also the difference here between a copular phrase and a noun phrase:

Jini havzi. “This is a cat.” jin havzi “this cat”

Regarding when to use which demonstrative, it’s fairly straightforward, given a specific circumstance. Let’s say we had two nameless interlocutors in a bizarre, Photoshop-esque landscape with multi-colored bones, as shown below:

Let’s take our speaker as the dark red dude. If he wants to refer to the orange bone, he says jin tolorro. If he wants to refer to the green bone, he says haz tolorro. If he wants to refer to the blue bone, he says rek tolorro. Simple enough. Now let’s look at a different scenario:

In this scenario, if the speaker is still the red dude and the addressee is still the yellow dude, the same exact demonstratives are used as were used in the previous example (jin for orange; haz for green; rek for blue). If his addressee is the pinkish dude, though, you’d use haz for blue and rek for green. The choice will be determined by who’s being spoken to, not how close the thing is to the speaker, necessarily.

Now how about if the red dude is speaking to both of those other dudes at the same time. In that instance, you’d use haz for both and point or further specify with words if necessary. Since both addressees are being addressed at once, anything that’s near either of them will be considered close enough to warrant haz.

Now let’s throw in a further wrinkle:

A new light blue bone has fallen from the sky! Let’s say that the red dude is addressing the yellow dude and the pink dude is just there. In this case, the red dude will refer to both blue bones with rek. The reason is that the green bone is still present. As it’s the closest to the addressee, it will get haz. This leaves rek to handle both of the bones that are further away, and the speaker will have to further specify if further specification is required.

Now how about this scenario:

Now the red dude is thinking about the light blue bone from the last picture. In this case, the red dude refers to the light blue bone with rek. Presumably he could only do so if the light blue bone was known to both he and the yellow dude (otherwise he would need to introduce it into the discourse), but once it’s a part of the shared experience of speaker and addressee, it can be referred to with a demonstrative. As the addressee has a bone that’s near at hand (the green bone), it gets haz, leaving rek for the light blue bone.

Now how about this scenario:

Yellow dude was out for his morning ride (around the green bone like every morning), when he sees that his friend red dude is lying on the ground in distress. He dismounts and walks past the green bone to get a closer look. Red dude, for whatever reason, has been incapacitated, and, as he gurgles out, the only thing that will save him is the orange bone that’s relatively near at hand. What the red dude does, then, is refers to the orange bone with haz, rather than jin, in order to imply to the yellow dude that the orange bone is not, in fact, nearby. Though it may be physically quite close, in this instance, it’s further than his body will take him, and so he uses haz to indicate that. If he were to refer to the green bone for any reason, then, he’d use rek, even though it’s quite close to the addressee.

This kind of gives you an idea how to choose between the three demonstratives of Dothraki. This same schema applies to non-physical elements, such as discourse topics. So, for example, if a speaker has an idea about something, he may refer to that idea with jin (as it’s a produce of the speaker’s imagination, the idea is, metaphorically speaking, near at hand). An idea that an addressee has come up with, then, can be referred to with haz. Something that’s to be introduced to the discourse (which is, perhaps, the product of neither speaker nor addressee) can be referred to with rek.

In addition, due to the nature of this spatial metaphor, a Dothraki can actually give opinions about another’s idea by using a different demonstrative. So, for example:

Hazi dirge davra! “That’s a good idea!” Reki dirge toki! “That’s a stupid idea!”

Both ideas are the product of the same person, but by using reki in the second sentence, the speaker has attempted to place the idea even further out of the discourse space, making it seem bizarre (and, thereby, unacceptable). And, of course, a speaker can take that the other way, using jin to make it seem like they had something to do with the idea, even though someone else came up with it.

As this post is getting a bit long, I’m going to cut it off here, but it’s a start! Consider this an introduction to deixis in Dothraki. More will follow in future posts.

 

Posted in Grammar

8 Comments

Tags: detailed, metaphor

Modern TerminologyFeb 17

Posted by David J. Peterson

I’m back home from Albuquerque, and finally getting back into the swing of things. I don’t have any pictures of me presenting (I was presenting), but here’s an awesome picture of me with Sean Endymion from the University of Texas, San Antonio. He’s got “Valar Morghulis” and “Valar Dohaeris” tattoed on his arms:

Pretty cool! Now let’s take a look at some of the words coined for modern implements.

As ingsve rightly pointed out, I did, in fact, coin something for “train” in the New York Times article (forgot!). The coinage I came up with was zhav taoka, which is “metallic lizard” or “metal lizard”. Looking at it now, though, I think gezri taoka, “metallic serpent”, makes more sense. Hrakkar, though, came up with some really cool possibilities:

vezhtawaki “metal stallion” vezhshiqethi “iron stallion”

Those are pretty cool! I think over time, vezhshiqethi would simplify to vezzhiqethi, making it even more cohesive. Another option would be vezh taoka. I think any of those would work. The difference between using tawak with the genitive and taoka (simply an adjective) is that tawaki might suggest “real” instead of “metal”, since, as an adjective, tawak means “real” or “authentic” (though the -i on the end should make it clear that it’s not an adjective).

As Hrakkar pointed out, trains and cars probably aren’t dissimilar enough to merit separate coinages. Using rhaggat, as ingsve suggested, would probably be what would happen (after all, we got our word “car” pretty much the same way). However, I would like to suggest (in honor of both Bob Marley and Hrakkar’s awesome neologisms) hrakkarshiqethi: an iron lion! (Hey, even if it doesn’t work for a general word for “car”, it could certainly be a brand of car.)

For airplane, ingsve suggested rhaggat asavva, “sky cart”, on analogy with rhaggat eveth, “water cart” (which is the word for “ship”). Hrakkar, yet again, busted out some awesome ones:

zirtawaki “metal bird” vezhasavva “sky stallion” sajasavva “sky steed”

I love all of those. “Sky stallion” just sounds awesome. From the Dothraki perspective, though, I kind of like sajasavva better (makes it feel like the pilot is more in control).

We also had a suggestion for a Klingon spaceship in a pretty kickass (and lengthy!) comment from LoghaD . After all, if the main warship of the Klingon is the bird of prey, it would certainly make sense to translate it directly as zirqoyi. I like it! As for how “Klingon” would render in Dothraki, my guess would be khlingan (based on the breathiness of the original affricate, which I think would take precedence over the stop). This would mean that there would be a hard g sound, but I find that more likely than the velar nasal becoming alveolar.

As we jump to cellphone, things do become quite a bit more abstract. The first is ingsve’s long-range compound vekhikh astokhhezhahan, which I would bracket this way:

[ vekhikh [ [ [ astokh ] hezhah ] -an ] ]

If you can follow that, the word is actually a tripartite compound (and, by the way, the way ingsve wrote this might serve to answer one of loghaD’s questions from the last post), rather

than a two-word compound plus another word, and means “thing for far-speech”. If this were a real compound, the word vekhikh adds practically nothing, as far as semantics goes, so it would likely drop out, leaving astokhhezhahan. By projecting, I could see that being reduced phonologically to astokhezhahan and then astokhezhaan and then astokhezhan—and maybe even further to tokhezhan. It’s not monosyllabic like “cell”, but it’s close!

Hrakkar’s suggestion would need a little work. If the intended meaning is “something that converses intended for one’s hand”, I’d probably retranslate it as “thing for hand-conversation”. The word for “conversation” is vasterikh, so “hand-conversation” would be vasterikhqora or maybe vasterikh qora (the difference being where the stress would land). That’d give us vekhikh vasterikh qoran, and then vasterikh qoran, and maybe vasterikhoran—and then after that, maybe rikhoran. That could work!

While we’re on phone, ingsve also came up with a word for smart phone, specifically: vekhikhdavrakhan, i.e. “a thing for apps”. This was based on an interview I did somewhere where they asked me what a Dothraki translation for “app” would be. I said that an app is a “useful thing”, which I translated as davrakhan. Somehow, though, that became the word for app (unofficially officially). So, when ingsve got to “computer”, he added the augmentative suffix to the word for smartphone: vekhikhdavrakhanof. This is rather something to ponder. After all, there’s no question that the computer came first, but it does rather seem like computers and smartphones are getting closer and closer to one another (especially for us Apple users). I’ll bet there are probably young kids (or kids not yet born yet) who think (or will think) of computers as big iPhones, rather than iPhones as small computers! Wild.

Hrakkar’s suggestion was dirgakhtawaki, which is a “metal thinker”. I think I might prefer dirgak taoka (or dirgakhtaoka), but I can see the former working.

For “e-mail” and “text”, there were calls for more words, and, indeed, that’s probably in order. Hrakkar suggested asathmovezari, “words of magic”. I think the adjective would work better there, giving us asmove, “magic words”. But something that would probably make this a lot easier is the word assokh, which means “message” (also means “instruction”; comes from the same root as ase, “command”). The question then becomes, though, is it important to distinguish between text message and e-mail? It is in our world (so you don’t waste time checking your texts if someone’s sent you an e-mail, and vice-versa), but it may be hard to distinguish without more specific vocabulary having to do with “writing”.

Thanks for the comments, though! I had a lot of fun reading through them. Look for this to become a regular feature on the blog. I’ll have to think up a title for it, though, so we know what we’re talking about… Any suggestions?

 

Posted in Community, Vocabulary

7 Comments

Tags: misc, responses, technology, translation

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About Dothraki

The Dothraki language was created by David J. Peterson for HBO‘s Game of Thrones (an adaptation of George R. R. Martin‘s A Song of Ice and Fire), and is spoken by the Dothraki people. In Martin’s universe, the Dothraki are a race of nomadic horse warriors that live across the Narrow Sea on a large steppe-like grass plain known as the Dothraki Sea. Though they have a city (Vaes Dothrak), they go there only to trade, and never stay for long, ranging wide across the Dothraki Sea and stopping in at the cities that dot the coasts (the Free Cities, Slaver’s Bay, etc.).

The language (as it is today) is an expansion of the small bits of Dothraki found in the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s now a fully-functional, human-usable language with a vocabulary of over 3,000 words (and growing).

For introductory information about the language, check out the following resources:

The Dothraki Language Wiki The Learn Dothraki Forum

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home archives about

Reddit AMAMarch 22nd, 2012 — Announcements

David Peterson is doing an AMA with Reddit today. Drop by to ask questions or leave a comment.

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CNN’s The Next List and RedditMarch 19th, 2012 — Dothraki

David’s going to be profiled on CNN’s The Next List on April 8th at 2 p.m. EDT. In addition, for those who are redditors, David will be doing an AMA this Thursday on Reddit (he’ll get on to answer questions around 6 p.m. PDT).

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David Interviewed on Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin ShowFebruary 7th, 2012 — Conlanging, Dothraki

David talks Dothraki and conlanging on The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show. You can listen to the podcast episode using iTunes or not using iTunes.

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Update: Dothraki Presentations at SWTX PCA/ACAFebruary 1st, 2012 — Announcements, Dothraki

David’s public talk (“Thinking Dothraki”) for Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations 33rd Annual Conference will be held at the Albuquerque Hyatt at 7:00 p.m. Mountain Time on Friday, February 10th. Admission for the general public is $5, and all proceeds go to the American Cancer Society of Albuquerque. After the talk, there will be a screening of Episode 6 from Season 1 of Game of Thrones, “A Crown of Gold”.

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Dothraki Presentations at SWTX PCA/ACAJanuary 23rd, 2012 — Announcements, Dothraki

David will be making two presentations at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations 33rd Annual Conference being held in Albuquerque, New Mexico February 8th-11th. If you’re available and in the area, one of his talks will be open to the public (Friday, February 10th; more information forthcoming). You can download the conference program here (.pdf).

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Dothraki in the New York TimesDecember 11th, 2011 — Dothraki, Press

There are a couple stories on Dothraki in today’s New York Times. Check out the main article by Amy Chozick here (“Concocted Languages to Make Other Worlds Feel Real”), and check out this supplement in the ArtsBeat blog by Jeremy Egner (“Rosetta Throne: Learn to Speak Dothraki”).

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New Dothraki BlogSeptember 10th, 2011 — Announcements, Dothraki

There’s a new blog about the Dothraki language over at Dothraki.com. This blog will focus exclusively on news and press about Dothraki in Game of Thrones, and will be updated somewhat infrequently; the blog at Dothraki.com will be about the language itself, and will be updated more frequently. Thanks for reading!

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New Dothraki WordsAugust 29th, 2011 — Announcements, Dothraki

So it turned out to be more than a few days, but I’ve finally finished coining new Dothraki words based on the names of those who asked questions during my Dothraki presentation at WorldCon. It involved me reviewing the history of boot making and coining dozens of unrelated words, but I’m all finished, so here they are (note: if I’ve spelled your name wrong, or you’d like to give me your last name and/or website to link to, tweet at me here):

Key: Name – Dothraki Word (part of speech) definition. o Notes.

Dave – dave (animate noun) rosemary bush (also an adjective meaning “pungent”). o There’s already a stem dev (based on my name!), so I went with the spelling, even

though it’s pronounced nothing like “Dave” in English. The inspiration for this word came when I was sitting at my computer trying to come up with words and my wife said, “Dave, can you get me some rosemary from the bush outside?”

Dan – dan (inanimate noun) ford (i.e. a place where you can cross a river comfortably on horseback).

o There was already a word based on the stem dan, so I just had to coin a homonym (not much else you can do with “Dan”!).

Ryan – rayan (inanimate noun) summit, top, plateau (mainly geological). o The stress shifts to the final syllable, of course, but that just makes the word sound

more epic, in my opinion.

Jon (or perhaps John…?) – jon (adjective) closed, shut, sealed (refers to a seal on a container or something that fits tightly).

o My friend Jon already claimed the root jan, which is used for jano, the word for “dog”, so I had to go with the spelling rather than the pronunciation here.

Rick or Rich – rich (inanimate noun) a bubble or swelling of some kind. o I got a lot of mileage out of this root, coining six related words from it.

Perry – ferri (inanimate noun, class A, stem fer-) hemp (the material). o Likely to be abundant in, at least, the southern half of Essos, hemp is a useful

thing to make stuff out of. Regarding the form, older Dothraki *p became modern Dothraki f, and so the old word *perri has become modern ferri

Sondra (or Sandra…?) – sondra (inanimate noun, class B) obsidian (or what the Valyrians and Westerosi call dragon glass).

o I was wondering what to do for this word, but your name looks so much like another pattern of words I’ve set up for precious gems and metals, this seemed like kismet. Oh, and by the way: if your name is spelled “Sandra” rather than “Sondra”, it’s not too late to change the word!

Gene – jin (animate noun) goat (female). o I know you’re male, Gene, but I needed a word for a female goat! This just

seemed to fit. (Perhaps as consolation, there is another word jin which means “this”—probably one of the most commonly used words in Dothraki.)

Mapu – mafo (animate noun) young goat, kid. o A member of the Brotherhood Without Banners hailing from New Zealand! Note

that the older form of this word was, in fact, *mapu, but due to regular sound changes, is now mafo

Sierra – siera (animate noun) nephew. o Your full name would, in fact, be a licit form in Dothraki, but siera fits a

previously-established pattern really, really well, so I dropped one of the rhotics.

Janice – janise (animate noun) niece. o As with siera, janise (with the -e pronounced at the end) fits a previously-

established pattern very well, so I added it on the end.

Finally, there are three people I’d like to mention specially (and for whom I’ve coined words):

Kim Raymoure – kim (animate noun) ancestor (also an adjective meaning [roughly] “original”).

o Kim came to all my panels at WorldCon (and the LCS workshop!), and helped to make my first foray into cons a pleasant one. (It’s so nice to see people in the audience who are interested and not scowling.) In addition to be generally cool, she’s written a book on Linear A, which is about as wild as wild gets.

Tim Stoffel – tim (inanimate noun) boot. o Tim—known as Hrakkar over at the Dothraki fora—really went above and

beyond for my wife and me at WorldCon. We were staying at Circus Circus, which was quite far away from the convention center, and Tim offered to basically shuttle us back and forth the whole time. It saved us a lot of money and a lot of hassle. Tim is also a keeper of big cats, but since I (quite coincidentally) had already coined the Dothraki word for cat (havzi) after the name of his former liger (Hobbes), I felt another word was in order.

Leigh Bardugo – lei (animate noun) ghost (also the adjective for “lost”, this is a term for an adult whose body is not burned, and, hence, is not able to ride into the Night Lands).

o Last, but certainly not least! Leigh bravely ventured forth during my presentation to read a dialogue with me, and did her best to power through an incredibly long Dothraki passage I sprung on her. She’s a good sport (a real lajak), and so I wanted to honor her with a nice, meaty word that will certainly enjoy use at some point in time. Ultimately, the word derives from *leɣi, which one might spell “leghi”, which contains all the letters for Leigh’s name, so she can always know that it was her name this word was coined from (thanks for passing along your card so I could get the spelling right!).

Thanks again to everyone who came out to the Dothraki presentation! If all goes well, I hope to be at future WorldCons, and to meet many more who are enthusiastic about language and want to talk conlanging.

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Dothraki Presentation at WorldConAugust 19th, 2011 — Announcements, Dothraki

For those interested, you can download the Dothraki presentation I made at Renovation here in a couple of different formats: .PDF, .PPT, and the original Keynote. Check back here in the next few days to see the new Dothraki words coined for those who asked questions!

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Dothraki at WorldConAugust 1st, 2011 — Conlanging, Dothraki

David Peterson will be appearing in a few panels at the 69th Annual World Science Fiction Convention, and will be presenting a talk entitled “Understanding Dothraki”. For more information, follow the Renovation LiveJournal, or the Renovation program Twitter account.

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Please contact us for a (free) detailed consultation and estimate: lcs@conlang.org.

Professional language creation

The Language Creation Society (LCS) provides an agency service for people interested in having a new language created for one or more of their projects.

Such projects may include:

a novel set in a fictional world a film or TV show that cares about giving depth to its alien species and foreign cultures a computer game with short flavor text, unit acks, or GUI decoration in an in-world

language a role-playing game or other setting needing believable names, phrases, and linguistic

culture

...and more, limited only by your imagination

From your perspective, the process is smooth and easy. We talk about your needs and the project details, exchange basic paperwork (we'll provide it or work with yours), and then you relax while our conlangers get to work creating a new language just for you. The result—possibly several proposals for you to choose from, depending on the project—are delivered to you in a single, professional package—already completely vetted and reviewed by us for quality.

The language made for you will incorporate and standardize any preexisting material you have, any cultural or aesthetic requirements you decide on, etc. It can optionally include a new writing system (typically packaged as a standard font usable in any word processor), recorded samples of all translated text and pronunciation guides, novel songs, or any other such needs.

A mid-level project will include a novel phonology (with pronunciation guide, guide for Yourlang-accented English, etc); novel grammar (with a linguistic sketch); ~1,000-2,000 words of vocabulary (plus ~50-100 sample names and a couple dozen phrases of cultural significance); and a full translation of one batch of material (including for each an interlinear that gives the exact pronunciation, morpheme-by-morpheme literal translation, English equivalent, recorded sample, and any notes needed about relevant subtleties of usage or grammar).

For some projects, such as TV shows and movies, we can do a moderate amount of "script polishing" related to the new language - e.g. creating appropriate detailed dialogue for sketched-out scenes.

It can take more than a year—or even more than a lifetime—to develop a complete and fully fleshed-out language, but the first stage of a typical project will take about two months to complete, after which further translations, etc. can be done within one month. We can accommodate significantly faster projects, depending on their scope, for an additional cost.

Previous clients

One of our previous clients was HBO, for whom we were asked to create the Dothraki language for their new TV show Game of Thrones. We provided them with multiple fully fleshed out proposals, script polishing, audio supplements, etc.

The producer of Game of Thrones, Dan Weiss, was "thrilled" with our work. "We're tremendously excited to be working with David and the LCS," says producer D.B. Weiss. "The language he's devised is phenomenal. It captures the essence of the Dothraki, and brings another level of richness to their world. We look forward to his first collection of Dothraki love sonnets."

We're certain that you'll be just as thrilled with the quality of our work and ease of working with us.

Why hire the LCS?

Simple: we make it easy and reliable.

In a typical mid-to-large sized project, we can provide multiple proposals for you—each already fully vetted—and you merely need to choose the one you like best aesthetically.

If you do it yourself, chances are that you simply don't have the skills needed, or the time to acquire them. It takes a fair amount of time to learn to do it well (though if you'd like to do so we're happy to help!). One needs to know a broad range of topics within linguistics, from phonology to pragmatics and typology, and in ways that are not easily acquired except by doing (and doing poorly) several times. And just linguistics is not enough; creating a language is quite different from describing one! By hiring us, you free yourself to concentrate on what you do best (writing, filming, coding, art, ...) and know that you'll have a great language that meshes well with your world.

If you hire someone directly, you have no guarantee that they know how to create a language (which is a specialized skill that most linguists do not have), that what they make will suit your needs, or that they'll come through at all. By hiring us, you can be certain that you'll get a highly skilled conlanger and that the job will be done—and done well. The LCS handles all assessment, negotiation, legal and tax requirements, etc., and will find appropriate conlangers for the job. All of these can be complicated things to do or evaluate on your own, especially if you don't have an intimate knowledge of the craft of language creation and the people in our community.

Our conlangers - ~40 in total - are the most experienced in the world, representing a wide variety of styles and specialties. Most have been making languages for years (or decades!), many have advanced degrees in linguistics, and all have demonstrated competence. You simply won't find better people.

All of our conlangers are under comprehensive non-disclosure agreements, and we can accomodate any reasonable needs for confidentiality—though of course we prefer to be able to tell everyone about your project!

What does it cost?

Initial consultation (determining what you need, what aesthetics you're aiming for, etc.) is free.

The cost of the language is divided between a one-time creation fee (to bootstrap the language), and a lower fee per item (or batch of items, like a single TV script) requiring translations and new words.

Cost depends significantly on a number of factors, including who will own the language, what extras you want, how difficult the requirements are, how urgently you need results, whether it is used for a large commercial venture or a small or nonprofit one, how extensive/thorough a language is needed, how much positive press we would get from it, etc.

The LCS takes a 10-15% cut of all proceeds; the rest goes to the conlanger(s) working on the project. Project fees are not tax-deductible, as they are paid for services rendered and not a donation.

As a ballpark estimate for a medium to large sized project, expect the initial cost to be ~$1,000-$20,000 and the batch cost for translations to be ~$500-$5,000 for about 10 additional pages of translated material. This includes a reasonable amount of post-delivery tweaking and other minor changes.

If your project is smaller - e.g. you only need a naming language with a consistent way to create words and a skeletal grammar that could be filled in later - then the cost is ~$200-$1,000.

We accept payment by check or PayPal; 50% of the initial cost is due upfront, 50% on delivery. You only pay us; we pay anyone else involved.

Please contact us for a (free) detailed consultation and estimate: lcs@conlang.org.

Options

1. Originality 1. Fully original language

Made from scratch exactly to your needs2. Licensed extant language

Choose from a number of existing conlangs. This is cheaper, since the language is already made, and can be better quality, since it's typically been worked on for longer. However, unlike an original language, it is licensed, not sold outright, and it is not customized to your project.

3. Translations into a public domain languageGet your dialogue in Esperanto, Quenya, Lojban, or another public language.

2. Language type 1. A priori artistic language

The most common, this is a naturalistic language, but not derived from any extant world languages per se. Instead, an artlang's vocabulary and grammar are completely customized to fit aesthetically with a particular culture.

2. Alternate-historical languageSet in an alternate Earth, an alt-history language fits convincingly in an existing language family (e.g. Semitic, like Arabic and Hebrew), or is a plausible projection of what would happen if two languages came into contact and creolized (e.g. if Thailand invaded France, what would they speak in 100 years?). Our linguists have combined expertise spanning nearly all the world's language families.

3. Auxiliary languageMeant to be extremely easy to learn and culturally neutral, an auxlang typically is made by combining vocabulary from a wide variety of natural languages together with a streamlined, simplified grammar.

3. Extras 1. Constructed script

A custom made writing system to your aesthetic guidelines. Can be made to retcon existing artistic material into a real, consistent orthography. Extra cost

~$100-$1,000, depending on complexity. Alphabetic writing systems come packaged as a standard font; for more complex scripts, please ask.

2. Multiple proposalsInstead of getting just one final proposal, get 3-7 representative samples to choose from, for an extra upfront fee of ~20-50%. You only get to pick one to be completed, but more choices = more certainty of getting a proposal you really like aesthetically. If you decide to pick more than one, you can do so for a discount off the normal full price.

3. Rush serviceNeed something done in days or weeks, not two months? Depending on your needs, we can do this. Contact us for an estimate.

4. Bulk order & language familiesNeed more than one language for the same project, like one for each of several different tribes? Not only do you get a discount, we can ensure that the languages have whatever historical interrelationships you desire.

5. On-site supportA limited amount of phone consultation to help you learn how to pronounce your new language is of course free. However, some projects (e.g. film, TV) may need more extensive, on-site support - from dialogue coaching for actors to on-the-spot revisions and extensions to the language or translations. Available for a per diem rate plus travel costs.

4. Documentation / translation languageNeed work in a language other than English? Our conlangers also claim fluency in:

o Croatiano Danisho Esperantoo Frencho Germano Italiano Nahuatlo Portugeseo Sloveniano Spanish

... as well as linguistic knowledge of a wide array of other languages.