Game of Thrones' Dothraki: meet the man who invented a language
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Version 0 of 1. Put yourself in the actor Iain Glen’s shoes. Filming for the second series of Game of Thrones, the director tells you to ad-lib a line. Not an English line either, a Dothraki line – the language used by the eponymous horse-mounted warrior race of Essos, the land to the east of Westeros. Related: Game of Thrones spawns an app to help fans learn to speak Dothraki And there’s a problem: the language expert who is supposed to be on call to tell you what to say - and how to say it - can’t be raised. You have to wing it. So you clear your throat, try to remember the gist of the language sounds, and go for it. In California, more than 5,000 miles away from the Thrones set in Northern Ireland, Dothraki’s creator is sleeping soundly – the one night he thought he could get away with a few extra hours of shut-eye. “They emailed me at four in the morning, asking for a line and I didn’t get that request until I woke up and by then it was too late,” says David J Peterson, a co-founder of the Language Creation Society and father not only of Dothraki but of the high and low Valyrian languages used in Game of Thrones. “That was the last – or not the last line, but the last line of mine, in season two, when they had Iain Glen totally ad-lib something. I felt bad about that one, so I folded it in. He did a pretty good job of imitating Dothraki syllable structure. I was able to do something with it. That was fun.” The line Glen’s character Ser Jorah Mormont was asked to say was “Take all the gold and jewels”, which he rendered as Mas ovray movekkhi moskay. But for Peterson, the beauty of having invented your own language is that you can bend its rules to retrofix such production hiccups. “Something that helped me out tremendously was Glen’s character being non-Dothraki,” says Peterson. “One thing that non-native speakers will do is mispronounce tough consonants … And since a geminate velar fricative would likely be flubbed by a non-native speaker, I decided that this verb would somehow relate to vekhat – a verb so semantically empty I could make it mean just about anything. “Once I had the words chopped, I had an even greater challenge: to create something grammatical that would have the same intended meaning as ‘Take all the gold and jewels’. The presence of participles made this more difficult than it might have otherwise been, but I saw this as an opportunity to fill in some gaps in Dothraki’s vocabulary.” The resulting translation – “The loose valuables are for loading” – thus became canon, joining the 4,000-plus other words invented by Peterson based around the handful of Dothraki phrases coined in the George RR Martin books on which the show is based. Petersen’s association with Game of Thrones began in 2011 after winning a competition to write Dothraki words for the pilot. Desperate for the job, he wowed producers by submitting not just his brief, but a blueprint for the entire language and vocabulary. “I gathered all the words that existed in books one through three … and analysed them chronologically to determine what syllable shapes were like, what word shapes were like, which sounds could occur where. Then, once I had that, you can create more syllable shapes and determine what types of consonant clusters there would be at the beginning of a word. “Grammatically, it was just a matter of determining what I could get away with, what I was allowed to do. So, the few parts where there were two words that came next to one another, that limited what you could do with the language, if you wanted to make sure that everything that was in the book was still accurate afterwards.” 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. So for a coarse, tough people there must be some coarse, tough swear words? Peterson says there’s “tons” of Dothraki cusses, but that the worst words he has coined are in one of the show’s other languages, low Valyrian. “The ones that were dirtiest, that were never subtitled, were the ones for Kraznys, in season three, played by Dan Hildebrand. Some of his cronies, they just said really filthy things. But, of course, that was by request, you understand. Dave and Dan [David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the show’s producers], they love it.” |