Game of Thrones has started its eighth and final season. Apparently.
I say apparently because I’ve only ever seen a few minutes of the show (I had to check the eighth season bit). And the media coverage has been unavoidable, unless you are a sightless, hard of hearing anchorite sealed in a church wall whose wifi has been turned off for not paying the bill. They’ve been rolling out stories for months, reaching a crescendo this week (though we shall not be spared chin-stroking discussions of each episode).
I suspect you either like fantasy or you don’t. I enjoy speculative/science fiction but not fantasy. Nothing with dragons.
I’m not alone. There has long been a stubborn resistance to the show, rising in volume with each season. In fact it’s become a little like the joke about vegans: How do you recognise a GoT refusenik at a party? Don't worry, they'll soon tell you.
The first episode was … ok, apparently, according to some of the 17m people in the US alone who watched it.
The series itself is worshipped. Why? It has fine actors, amazing locations, super-high production values, authentic-looking costumes, plentiful deaths, sex and nudity (I gather), and a better-than-it-might-be script. Plus a constructed fictional language or two.
Dothraki, the first language of Game of Thrones (alongside Valyrian and, on screen at least, various accents of English), has been developed into a corpus of a few thousand words by the linguist David J Peterson, using the words and phrases in the novels of George RR Martin. Khaleesi, the Dothraki word for the wife of a rule, a khal, was adopted by Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emelia Clarke (above, with Kit Harington’s Jon Snow), and for a while became something of a popular name for girls.
What does Dothraki sound like? Like rough music to fans’ ears. I suspect I couldn't pick it out of a lineup of languages. As well as taking from the books it is influenced by “such languages as Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili”, according to the original press release. Peterson told the Guardian, “The result was a lightly inflectional, head-initial language, which Peterson says is not too dissimilar from Russian; though its vocabulary is closely tied to the historical cousins of the Dothraki, Ghengis Khan-era Mongolians, matching their lifestyles and experiences. Thus, there are two words for animal excrement – whether it’s fresh or dry – as the dry stuff was used as a winter fuel by Mongolians.” The language has a ton of curses, but Peterson says the dirtiest words he has coined, unsubtitled, are in low Valyrian.
Peterson, who’s been making up languages for a couple of decades, including for Emerald City, Bright and one of the Thor movies, faced two main constraints with Dothraki. The first was that it had to chime with what was in the books. The second was that the actors had to be able to easily learn and speak it.
We’ve of course been inventing fictional languages for yonks. Elvish in Lord of the Rings, the Russian-influenced Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange, Klingon and Vulcan in Star Trek, Avatar’s Na’vi, and you could even include the likes of 1984’s Newspeak and Riddley Walker’s Kentish-inflected post-apocalyptic English. More recently came the Heptapod language in the film Arrival, based on a rather splendid and moving short story by Ted Chiang, which was created by a bunch of academic linguists.
But fictional languages are just a small subset of constructed languages, or conlangs.
Esperanto is probably the best known. I was actually taught it at secondary school alongside Latin and French (it was an old-school school), though I have no memory of what we learnt. Probably: Esperanto is the perfect language. And: How long till the bell goes? (Kiom longe daŭros la sonorila sonorilo?) Esperanto, invented by a 19th century Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist, still has perhaps a couple of million speakers, though a dwindling number who speak it natively, apparently including George Soros.
Another was Volapük, created in the 19th century by a German Catholic priest named Johann Martin Schleyer, which once had 280 clubs around the world and more speakers than Esperanto, according to a terrific article on conlangs in the New Yorker a few years ago.
The article follows John Quijada, a non-linguist who made up a language called Ithkuil over three decades. In 2004, he published an online monograph, running to 160,000 words, that documented its grammar, syntax and vocab. Quijada expected no one to speak the language other than him, but it got picked up by some interesting groups and things got real weird.
The idea of the language was “to convey deeper levels of human cognition” than usual, while being “maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like ‘On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point’ becomes simply ‘Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.’ ”
To achieve this compression, Ithkuil has 58 phonemes. English has about 42. Hawaiian, which provided Pōwehi, the name for the M87 black hole, has 13. A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech distinguishing one word or word element from another. Such as the /t/ in rat, from rag and ran. Ithkuil's sounds thus predictably include jaw-breakingly difficult clicks and grunts.
The first artificial language of note, says the New Yorker, was Lingua Ignota (Unknown Language). It was created by Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th century German nun and mystic, who also composed what may be the earliest surviving morality play. More than 900 languages have been made up since, most going the way of many natural minority languages, existing only in dictionaries and the memories of a few elderly speakers. “The history of invented languages is, for the most part, a history of failure,” said Arika Okrent, the author of 2010’s In the Land of Invented Languages.
Languages need communities of speakers or they die. Today technology helps massively, so you have apps like Amikumu, through which you can find speakers of a language near you. Dothraki does have a book, online course and app, though it’s not as yet on Google Translate like Esperanto, nor is it on Duolingo like High Valyrian and Klingon (because, apparently, rights).
Anha astat davra qorasokh tat yer, Dothraki!
Untranslatable
Words that can't quite be translated into English hold a special place in my semantic heart. Here’s multilingual Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister, on Game of Thrones, explaining Danish slang words.