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By David J. Peterson

My name is David Peterson, and I’m a conlanger. “What’s a conlanger,” you may ask? Thanks to the recent addition of the word “conlang” to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), I can now say, “Look it up!” But to save you the trouble, a conlanger is a constructed language (or conlang) maker — i.e. one who creates languages.

Language creation has been around since at least the 12th century, when the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen created her Lingua Ignota — Latin for “hidden language” — an invented vocabulary she used for writing hymns. In the centuries that followed, philosophers like Leibniz and John Wilkins would create languages that were intended to serve as grand classification systems, and idealists like L. L. Zamenhof would create languages intended to simplify international communication. All these systems focused on the basic utility of language — its ability to encode and convey meaning. That would change in the 20th century.

Tolkien: the father of modern conlanging

Before crafting the tales of Middle-Earth, J. R. R. Tolkien was a conlanger. Unlike the many known to history who came before him, though, Tolkien created languages for the pure joy of it. Professionally, he became a philologist, but he continued to work on his own languages, eventually creating his famous Lord of the Rings series as an extension of the linguistic legendarium he’d been crafting for many years. Though his written works would become more famous than his linguistic creations, his conlangs, in particular Sindarin and Quenya, would go on to inspire new generations of conlangers throughout the rest of the 20th century.

Due to the general obscurity of the practice, many conlangers remained unknown to each other until the early 1990s, when home internet use started to become more and more common. The first dedicated meeting place for conlangers, virtual or otherwise, was the Conlang Listserv (an online mailing list). Some list members came out of interest in Tolkien’s languages, as well as other large projects, like Esperanto or Lojban, but the majority came to discuss their own work, and to meet and learn from others who also created languages.

Since the founding of the original Conlang Listserv, many other meeting places have sprung up online, and through a couple of decades of regular conlanger interaction, the practice of conlanging has evolved.

Conlang typology

Conlangs have been separated into different types since at least the 19th century. First came the philosophical languages, as discussed, then the auxiliary languages like Esperanto (also known as auxlangs), but with Tolkien emerged a new type of language: the artistic language, or artlang. At its most basic, an artlang is a conlang created for artistic purposes, but that broad definition includes many wildly divergent languages (compare Denis Moskowitz’s Rikchik to Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen). Finer-grained distinctions became necessary as the community grew, and so emerged the naturalistic conlang.

This is where the languages of HBO’s Game of Thrones and Syfy’s Defiance come in. The languages I’ve created for the shows I work on come out of the naturalist tradition. The goal with a naturalistic conlang is to create a language that’s as realistic as possible. The realism of a language is grounded in the reality (fictional or otherwise) of its speakers. If the speakers are more or less human (or humanoid) and are intended to be portrayed in a realistic fashion, then their language should be as similar as possible to a natural language (i.e. a language that exists here on Earth, like Spanish, Tagalog, or Cham).

The natural languages we speak are large, but also redundant and imperfect in a uniquely human way. Conlangers have gotten pretty good at emulating them over the years, usually employing one of two different approaches. The first, which I call the façade method, is to create a language that looks like a modern natural language by replicating the various features of a modern natural language. Thus, if English has irregular plurals, such as mouse~mice, then the conlang will have irregular plurals, too, by targeting certain nouns and making their plurals irregular in some way.

The historical method: making sense of irregular plurals in Valyrian

A contrasting approach is the method that Tolkien pioneered called the historical method. With the historical method, an ancestor language called a proto-language is created, and the desired language is evolved from it, via simulated linguistic evolution. The process takes a lot longer, but in some ways it’s simpler, since irregularities will naturally emerge, rather than having to be created by hand. For example, in Game of Thrones, the High Valyrian language Daenerys speaks differs from the Low Valyrian the residents of Slaver’s Bay speak. In fact, the latter evolved from the former. As the language evolved, it produced some natural irregularities. Consider the following nouns and their plurals from the Valyrian spoken in Slaver’s Bay:

hubre “goat” hubres “goats”
dare “queen” dari “queens”
aeske “master” aeske “masters”

Given that the singular forms all end in ‘e’, one has to say at least two of the plurals presented are irregular. But why the arbitrary differences in the plural forms? It turns out it’s because the three nouns with identical singular terminations used to have very different forms in the older language, High Valyrian, as shown below:

hobres “goat” hobresse “goats”
dāria “queen” dārī “queens”
āeksio “master” āeksia “masters”

Each of these alternations is quite regular in High Valyrian. In the simulated history, a series of sound changes which simplified the ends of words produced identical terminations for each of the three words in the singular, leaving later speakers having to memorize which have irregular plurals and which regular.

Conceptualizing time

Simulated evolution applies to both grammar and the lexicon, as well. For example, natural languages often derive terminology for abstract concepts metaphorically from terminology for concrete concepts. Time, for instance, is an abstract concept that is frequently discussed using spatial terminology. How it’s done differs from language to language. In English, events that occur later in time occur after the present (where “after” derives from “aft,” a word meaning “behind”), and events that occur earlier in time occur before the present. Thus, time is conceptualized as a being standing in the present, facing the past, with the future behind them.

In Irathient, a language I created for Syfy’s Defiance, time is conceptualized vertically, rather than horizontally. The word for “after”, in temporal terms, is shei, which derives from a word meaning “above”; “before”, on the other hand, is ur, which also means “below” or “underneath”. The general metaphor that the future is up and the past is down bears out throughout the rest of the language, where if one wanted to say “Go back to what you were saying before”, the literal Irathient translation would be “Go down to what you were saying underneath”.

Ultimately, what one hears on screen sounds and feels like a natural language, regardless of whether or not one knows the work that went on behind the scenes. Since the prop used on screen is a language, though, rather than a costume or a piece of the set, the words can be recorded and analyzed at any time. Consequently, a conlang needs to be real in a way that a throne or a 700 foot wall of ice does not.

It’s still extraordinary to me that in less than 25 years, we came from a time when many conlangers were not aware that there were other conlangers to a time where our work is able to add to the authenticity of some of the best productions the big and small screen have to offer. The addition of the word “conlang” to the OED is a fitting capper to an unbelievable quarter century.

David J. Peterson is a language creator who works on HBO’s Game of Thrones, Syfy’s Defiance, and Syfy’s Dominion. You can find him on Twitter at @Dedalvs or on Tumblr.

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Images: Game of Thrones Season 3 – Dragon Shadow Wallpaper and Game of Thrones Season 3 - Daenerys Wallpaper. ©2014 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The post How I created the languages of Dothraki and Valyrian for Game of Thrones appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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When a child experiences big feelings or emotions, it can be confusing, deflating, and sometimes scary for parents and the child. The 5 books listed here can help parents and children talk about and navigate the sometimes windy road of emotions.

Some colleagues and I were lucky enough to be invited to an advance screening of the new film starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schrieber, and Jamie Bell, Defiance. In 1942 a small group of Jewish resistance fighters established a community deep in the forests of western Belorussia, offering protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Within two years they numbered more than 1200 - it was the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in perhaps any war in history.

Their leader, the charismatic Tuvia Bielski (played by Daniel Craig) told his story to author Nechama Tec two weeks before he died in 1987, and she went on to write the book (published by OUP) on which the new film is based: Defiance - The True Story of the Bielski Partisans.

The film itself didn’t disappoint. As well as all the action you would expect from a war movie, there was also the human story of the hundreds of fugitives that were rescued, as well as the story of the Bielski brothers themselves. I’m not ashamed to admit that I shed a few tears in that cinema! Below is an extract from the book.

Tuvia was not interested in military glory. To live, to keep his people alive, to bring more Jews into the otriad, these were his goals. He would avoid talking to the non-Jewish partisans about his main preoccupation: the saving of lives. To them he presented himself as a guerrilla fighter and continually repeated that he had come to the forest to wage war against the enemies of the Soviet Union, the Germans. And when Panchenko suggested that they cooperate in anti-Nazi moves he readily agreed.

Their joint military ventures began in the last quarter of 1942 and continued into the second half of 1943. Although such anti-German moves were initiated by Panchenko, the two otriads each carried the same burden. Publicly Tuvia continued to emphasize his personal commitment to anti-German activities. In reality he and his group were under pressure to participate. A refusal could have endangered the very existence of the Bielski otriad. Russian partisans would not have tolerated an unwillingness to fight, especially not from Jews whom they suspected of cowardice. At this early stage, all forest dwellers were united in their hatred toward the Germans and their collaborators. These feelings of hostility were supported by equally strong ideas that it was important to fight their common enemy, the Germans.

Russian partisans were very belligerent when they talked about their enemy—killing Germans was equated with patriotism. Hero worship was common. How much of a hero a person was depended on how daring and life-threatening the person’s opposition was to the Nazis. But this high value placed on fighting the enemy did not correspond to actual combat; their belligerence was merely verbal. Inevitably, however, these favorable ideas about guerrilla fighting came with a devaluation of those who could not wage war. Nonfighters were subjected to ridicule and contempt. The disheveled and hungry ghetto runaways in particular were sometimes greeted by Russian partisans with a sneering, “Why did you work for the Germans instead of fighting?”

The forest was pervaded with ideas that fighting and causing damage to the Germans and their collaborators was good. Even young ghetto runaways after they were accepted into a Russian otriad would soon become strong advocates of the “wage a war ethic.” In their case, as with others, the admiration of anti-German fighters came with a disapproval of non-fighters.

One of these young Jewish partisans admits, “I looked at the Bielski otriad with its one thousand Jews, most of whom could not fight, and thought: ‘So what? But they do not fight!’ I believed that they should have fought the Germans. As a Russian partisan I felt self-important.” The idea that waging war against the Germans was more important than saving lives was implicitly accepted by many others. And while the degree of such acceptance varied, to some extent it was always there. Indirectly, support for this ideology sometimes had tragic consequences. The actions of known Jewish partisan fighters reflect this attitude. Dr. Icheskel Atlas, Alter Dworecki, and Hirsz Kaplinski each distinguished himself as an outstanding partisan leader. Each courageously battled the enemy. By the end of December 1942, they had all been killed in action.

During their short careers as partisan leaders, the three operated in and around the huge Lipiczańska forest. With its jungle-like growths, islands of swampy terrain, and irregular, poorly built country roads, this forest promised safety to many of the persecuted. Lipiczańska forest became home for both Jewish and Russian partisans. It also became a haven for ghetto runaways, many of whom were older people, women, and children. Small family clusters or units of unattached fugitives were scattered all over this forest. Disorganized and unprotected, these groups lived in primitive bunkers. Some would beg for food from surrounding farms; the few who had guns would get their provisions by using force. Still, the very few who brought some money or valuables with them would exchange these for food. Unaccustomed to life in the forest, many fugitives were attacked by unruly partisan bands and robbed of their meager belongings, and some were murdered in the process. Without the support of a large group like the Bielski otriad many died from cold, starvation, and epidemics.

Defiance will be in UK cinemas from January 9th and will be in US cinemas from January 16th.

Author: Margaret Shannon
Illustrator: Margaret Shannon
Published: 2006 Houghton Mifflin Canda Ltd
ISBN: 0618737448 Chapters.ca Amazon.com

Brimming with mystique and echoes of Sendak, this fresh fairy tale subtly, yet powerfully, casts light on the costs of safety and the value of freedom. Our whole family is entranced by this fabulous book.