Inventing a language

I remember as a child being chastised by my teachers for using made up words. If it wasn’t a ‘real’ word, I wasn’t allowed to use it in my school work. To be fair, those teachers were trying to give me the kind of education that would allow me to make a living when I grew up.

Imagine my surprise and delight a couple of nights ago when I saw an interview with a man who is making a living out of making up not just words – but whole languages!

The interview was with David Peterson, a linguist and the author of a new book called The Art of Language Invention. I was riveted. Peterson is the man who invented the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones and a number of other languages for fantasy worlds. He also has the awesome title of President of the Language Creation Society.

OK – George R R Martin started it by inventing a staggeringly real fantasy culture in his books. Martin gave his characters some Dothraki words – but all that he could do was toss in the odd word here and there. The book had to be in a language the reader would understand. But when it came to the TV series , everything changed. A conversation could take place in Dothraki or Valyrian , and subtitles would keep the viewer informed.

Peterson said he took the few words Martin had used as his base, and built from there. And now there are websites and dictionaries and conventions and lectures devoted to his “made up” words.

He’s not the first of course. Tolkien invented Elvish languages. Marc Okrand invented Klingon for the Star Trek Universe. But listening to Peterson talk was something of a revelation.

He gives his languages proper grammar, with prefixes and suffixes and plurals and tenses of verbs. He works with vowel sounds, and tries to get a constant and proper vowel to consonant ratio. I wonder if he has studied Welsh – with its fascinating take on just how many vowels and consonants a word needs

Peterson tries to make a language sound as it if has evolved over time. A language, he said, should fit a world or a character like a well-worn shoe. And it should feel ‘right’. When someone suggests I should try reading Hamlet in the original Klingon… it should feel like that might actually work. My Klingon, however, just isn’t up to it.

If you go over to You Tube and search, there are videos of Peterson speaking Dothraki speech. It sounds pretty real to me.

So all I can do is wish him – Qapla’ (Klingon for success)

And the same to all the others who do this sort of thing.

I discovered there are websites dedicated to teaching people how to create a proper language. I’m keeping a note of that… because one of these days, when I finally write those dragon books I have been thinking about for years, I may be able to invent dragon language…

Now wouldn’t that be something to tell my old school teachers.