2024-03-26 21:00:00
They are behind the creation of the Dothraki or the Valyrian of “Game of Thrones” and the Shakobsa of “Dune”. Americans David and Jessie Peterson are language inventors and one of the few who make a living from this profession that they define as “a game.”
“Yer athzalar nakhoki anni, zhey qoy qoyi”, that is, “you are my last hope, blood of my blood”. What would the ‘Game of Thrones’ series be without these dialogues that immerse the viewer in the fight for the Iron Throne?
In the “Dune” saga films, the Fremen speak in Shakobsa by vibrating their R’s. Originally, the novelist Frank Herbert was inspired by a hunting dialect to create this language in his book, now brought to the big screen by Denis Villeneuve.
However, both Herbert and George RR Martin in their medieval fantasy saga had barely included a few words of these languages in their pages.
After a competition organized in 2009, David Peterson was chosen to develop Dothraki. That was his first paid assignment and it launched the career of this linguistics graduate. “Languages can be fun, but they are often treated too seriously. You have to laugh when you make a mistake,” observes this expert during one of the master classes that he has given at the international Séries Mania festival in Lille, in the north of France.
With the help of his wife, Jessie, who has always liked word games, they start from the script and ask questions about the protagonists’ environment, their history, the objects they use.…And then we “extrapolate,” says David.
For example, Jessie had to create a language “that sounds like fire” for the Pixar animated film “Elemental.” So she recorded a series of sounds (explosions, the noise of a match…) and assembled them to form words.
On the street she has already heard several children addressing their parents in this language: a source of pride for her.
“Game of Thrones” fan communities worship Dothraki or High Valyrian, which can be learned through courses or, in the case of the latter, in the Duolingo application, where their voices can be heard.
The use of language inventors has increased since the “Star Trek” saga, which used Klingon, created by Marc Okrand in 1985. However, many of them cannot make a living from their work.
living languages
David and Jessie Peterson don’t just invent a bunch of words. They even start by creating a grammar (how many genders, verb tenses…). And then David, an amateur musician, works on tonality, while Jessie develops vocabulary.
The work of creating languages is usually solitary, but the tight schedule of the series – they often only have two months – imposes this distribution of tasks.
The couple lays the groundwork as best they can for the actors, sending them recordings of the dialogue at normal speed, slow speed, and even syllable by syllable. “This makes us sweat a lot,” says David. At the first screening of “Game of Thrones” he heard a small mistake. “It was so embarrassing,” she confesses.
The duo sometimes creates new alphabets for messages that appear written on the screen, such as in the “Vampire Academy” series. “We start from images, and then we create symbols, which become letters,” explains David, who establishes a parallel with the invention of writing five millennia ago.
The couple enjoys sharing their experience live on their YouTube channel, LangTime Studio. There, they have uploaded about 600 episodes for fans of “conlang”, constructed languages or artificial languages.
Would it be possible to speed up the creation process thanks to artificial intelligence? “It would be very laborious to train an AI to produce a small number of things. I prefer to use that time to create the language myself,” David concludes.
“The beauty of language is that it is inherently human. There is no reason to take away the humanity of languages,” agrees Jessie.
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