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The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building, by David J. Peterson
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An insider’s tour through the construction of invented languages from the bestselling author and creator of languages for the HBO series Game of Thrones and the Syfy series Defiance
From master language creator David J. Peterson comes a creative guide to language construction for sci-fi and fantasy fans, writers, game creators, and language lovers. Peterson offers a captivating overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien’s creations and Klingon to today’s thriving global community of conlangers. He provides the essential tools necessary for inventing and evolving new languages, using examples from a variety of languages including his own creations, punctuated with references to everything from Star Wars to Michael Jackson. Along the way, behind-the-scenes stories lift the curtain on how he built languages like Dothraki for HBO’s Game of Thrones and Shiväisith for Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, and an included phrasebook will start fans speaking Peterson’s constructed languages. The Art of Language Invention is an inside look at a fascinating culture and an engaging entry into a flourishing art form—and it might be the most fun you’ll ever have with linguistics.
- Sales Rank: #17898 in Books
- Brand: David J Peterson
- Published on: 2015-09-29
- Released on: 2015-09-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Features
- The Art of Language Invention From Horse Lords to Dark Elves the Words Behind World Building
Review
“David Peterson's language work transformed our show, investing it with a sense of reality and history that would have been impossible without him. There's nothing like the real thing, and David Peterson is it. This fascinating book will not only illuminate the task of language creation--it will make you look at your own language in a whole new way.”
—David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, co-creators of HBO's Game of Thrones
“George R. R. Martin created Khal Drogo, and David Benioff and Dan Weiss believed in me, but David Peterson gave me life.”
—Jason Momoa
“David J. Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention accomplishes a minor miracle in taking a potentially arcane discipline and infusing it with life, humor and passion. It makes a compelling and entertaining case for language creation as visual and aural poetry. I cherish words, I love books about words and for me this is the best book about language since Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Traveled. And, best of all, there’s a phrasebook!”
—Kevin Murphy, co-creator and showrunner of Syfy’s Defiance
“If you want to know how someone makes up a language from the ground up, you'll find out how in this book—and the glory of it is that along the way you'll get the handiest introduction now in existence to what linguistics is. In fact, read this even if you DON'T feel like making up a language!”
—John McWhorter, author of The Language Hoax
“Accessible, entertaining, and thorough, Peterson has created an invaluable resource for authors, dedicated fans, and casual enthusiasts. This is the book I wish I'd had when I started writing.”
—Leigh Bardugo, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow and Bone
“This book not only lucidly ushers language invention into its own as an art form, it's also an excellent introduction to linguistics.”
—Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages
"Mr. Peterson illuminates the ins and outs of being a professional developer of “constructed languages”...Language invention requires not only technical know-how but also playfulness and a degree of historical savvy.”
—The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
David J. Peterson began creating languages in 2000, received his MA in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, in 2005, and cofounded the Language Creation Society in 2007. He has created languages for HBO’s Game of Thrones, Syfy’s Defiance and Dominion, the CW’s Star-Crossed, and Thor: The Dark World. He is also the author of Living Language Dothraki.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When I was a kid, the original Star Wars trilogy had just completed its initial run in theaters, and Star Wars was everywhere. I had a toy sand skimmer (which I broke), a toy TIE fighter (which I also broke), and a read-along Return of the Jedi picture book with accompanying record which would play the sound of a ship’s blaster when you were supposed to turn the page. (If you’re too young to be familiar with record players as anything other than “vinyl,” type “Pac-Man record read along” into YouTube to familiarize yourself with the concept. That was my childhood.)
In short, aside from He-Man, Star Wars was pretty much the thing if you were a child of four in 1985. At that age, when I watched movies, I didn’t really pay careful attention to the dialogue, and wasn’t able to follow stories that well. Consequently when the Star Wars trilogy was rereleased in 1995, I rewatched it eagerly. Once I got to Return of the Jedi, I was struck by what I thought was a particularly bizarre scene. In the beginning of the movie, Princess Leia, disguised as a bounty hunter, infiltrates Jabba the Hutt’s palace in order to rescue Han Solo. She pretends to have captured Chewbacca, and engages Jabba to negotiate a price for handing him over. In doing so, Leia pretends to speak (or evidently does speak, via some sort of voice modification device) a language Jabba doesn’t. He employs the recently acquired C-3PO as an intermediary. As near as I can tell, this is how the exchange goes (transcription is my own; accent marks indicate where the main stress is):
LEIA: Yaté. Yaté. Yotó. (SUBTITLE: “I have come for the bounty on this Wookiee.”)
C-3PO relays this message and Jabba says he’ll offer 25,000 for Chewie.
LEIA: Yotó. Yotó. (SUBTITLE: “50,000, no less.”)
C-3PO relays this message and Jabba asks why he should pay so much.
LEIA: Eí yóto.
The above isn’t subtitled, but Leia pulls out a bomb and activates it.
C-3PO: Because he’s holding a thermal detonator!
Jabba is impressed by this and offers 35,000.
LEIA: Yató cha.
The above isn’t subtitled, but Leia deactivates the bomb and puts it away.
C-3PO: He agrees.
Order is restored.
I want you to remember that I was in seventh or eighth grade at the time that I was rewatching this. I was not a “language” guy at that point by any stretch of the imagination. I never dreamed that a human could invent a language, and even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with a good reason for one to do so. Furthermore, up to that point, I’d never studied a second language, and the prospect filled me with dread (I had enough trouble understanding my Spanish-speaking relatives who always spoke too fast for me).
But even so, I knew something was wrong here. How on earth does Leia say the same thing twice and have it mean something different the second time? Even if we take C-3PO for an unreliable translator (he is quite loquacious, after all), that applies only to the last two phrases. How could one expect to have an unreliable subtitle? Subtitles are supposed to lie outside the world of the film. If you can’t rely on a subtitle provided by the film’s creators, how can you rely on anything?
In trying to resolve this conflict, it occurred to me that the only plausible explanation for this aberrant phenomenon is that the language itself was correct, but worked differently from all other human languages. In our languages (take English, for example), a word’s meaning can be affected by the context it’s in, but if you control for context, the word will always mean the same thing. Thus, if you’re telling a story about your dog, and you use the word “dog” several times throughout the story, it will still refer to a fur-covered animal that barks and covets nothing so highly as table scraps. This is fairly standard and uncontroversial.
What would happen if a language didn’t do that, though?
Take, for example, the word I have transcribed as yotó above. What if it changed its meaning over the duration of a discourse? Naturally, one would have to define a discourse, but I think it’s fair to consider this conversation featuring Leia, Jabba, and C-3PO a single discourse, so we can leave that concern aside for the moment. What if the word yotó has several definitions? Specifically, what if the first time it’s used in a conversation it means “this wookiee”; the second time it’s used it means “50,000”; and the third time it’s used it means “no less” (or the rough equivalent of those)? The same, then, applies for all other words in the language. That would resolve the ambiguity. How could one possibly use such a language? Well, they are all aliens (Star Wars, recall, takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). Maybe they’re just better at this stuff than humans. Why not?
This was where my brain went while rewatching Return of the Jedi for the first time. At some future date I may have shared this with a friend, but if I did, the response was likely an eyeroll. This quirk was just an unimportant detail in an otherwise fantastic movie. Why bother about it?
And so that’s pretty much where my thought experiment died. I didn’t take it any further, and no one was really interested, so I didn’t think about it again until college.
But that, of course, was a different era—a pre-internet era. Who does a teenager have to share news with other than their family, friends, and teachers? Who do they come in contact with? In 1995, that’s pretty much only the people who live near you and with whom you interact on a daily basis. How would you ever get ahold of anyone else? How would I have known that someone in the Bay Area, let’s say—less than five hundred miles away—had the same idea I’d had and also found that exchange interesting? In 1995, there was no way.
Then the internet happened.
Yes, the internet had been around for a while in 1995, but it wasn’t a thing that just anyone could have access to. America Online changed all that. Pretty soon it became a thing to race home from school and go into a chatroom with a bunch of random people to talk about . . . nothing. And that was how we entertained ourselves—for hours. What a world, where you could chat with someone who lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about how Soundgarden rules!
As it turns out, though, I wasn’t the only person to pick up on this. Another conlanger I’d later meet at the First Language Creation Conference, Matt Haupt, asked exactly the same question, and devoted a blog post to deconstructing that scene specifically. And we weren’t the only ones. The Ubese language has its own entry on the Wookieepedia (yes, that’s a thing) where contributors have written up an entire backstory for the language that is, first of all, not a full language, and, ultimately, poorly constructed and not worthy of serious consideration.
So let me bring back David Benioff and Dan Weiss’s question to me on the night of the Game of Thrones premiere. If the actors speaking Dothraki or High Valyrian or Castithan or whatever make a mistake, who would know but the creator? Who would care? The truth is probably one in a thousand people will notice, and of those who do, maybe a quarter will care. In the 1980s that amounts to nothing. In the new millennium, though, one quarter of 0.001 percent can constitute a significant minority on Twitter. Or on Tumblr. Or Facebook. Or Reddit. Or on whatever other social media service is currently taking the internet by storm. To take a recent (at the time of writing) example, there was Frozen fan fiction and fan art circulating the internet before the movie had even premiered—and when it did premiere, it took a matter of hours for everyone to learn that Kristoff’s boots weren’t properly fastened, and that this was a big deal as it was disrespectful to the Sami people and their culture.
One of the most significant things about our new interconnected world is that the internet can amplify a minority voice exponentially. Yes, few people, comparatively speaking, will care if an actor makes a mistake with their conlang lines. But thanks to the internet, those few people will find each other, and when they do, they’ll be capable of making a big noise. Every single aspect of every single production on the big and small screen is analyzed and reanalyzed the world over—and in real time. Every level of every production is being held to a higher standard, and audiences are growing savvier by the day. Language—created or otherwise—is no exception. In order to meet the heightened expectations of audiences everywhere, we have to raise the bar for languages created for any purpose. After all, if we don’t, we’ll hear about it.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Art of Language Invention educates and inspires as much as it entertains.
By Daniel M. Bensen
I spent a lot of time waiting in doctors’ offices last week, and I needed something to save me from boredom- and anxiety-induced insanity. What better choice could I have made than The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson?
Back when I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Dougal Dixon’s After Man: a Zoology of the Future. As an exercise in speculative biology, the book is responsible for maybe 90% of my enthusiasm about evolution, anatomy, and animal behavior. The fact that I know anything about those subjects at all is because I was enthusiastic for them, which puts Dixon to blame for most of what I know about the natural world. When I read The Art of Language Invention, the same thing happened with linguistics.
You can’t create a good made-up language without knowing about real languages. Through the lens of his invented languages and his experience using them, Peterson educates the reader about the forces that shape the way we speak—a practical gift wrapped in shiny packaging. Like all good speculation, The Art of Language Invention educates and inspires as much as it entertains.
And it IS entertaining, if for no other reason than the cat and onion jokes.
Go read it. I expect to see your new language on my desk by Monday.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
I kind of want to teach an Intro to Linguistics course just so I can use this as the textbook
By BenJamin P. Johnson
If you’ve ever thought about creating a language, but didn’t know where to start, or you were intimidated or overwhelmed by the masses of terminology or “denseness” of other books, start here. If you’ve been creating languages for decades and just need a fresh perspective, a good laugh, or some commiseration, check this out. If you’re a linguistics student struggling with the basics, and your Intro to Linguistics reading is so dry you can’t choke it down, this could easily pass as a funny, entertaining, and fairly complete Linguistics 101 textbook, with some conlanging on the side.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
How to be a conlanger.
By John E. Clifford
David Peterson is a genuinely nice guy, a trained linguist. a good writer and probably the most successful creator of languages today. All of this comes together in his book, which tells how to create a realistic language with copious examples from how Peterson actually did create Dothraki and the half dozen or so other languages now playing on your screen, large or small. While there is enough technical material to satisfy most conlanger needs, it is always wrapped in practical applications to make it palatable. The main theme is to grow your created language as much like a natural one as possible, starting in the past and working toward your target. As a result, most of standard linguistics finds their places along with a lot of less systematic advice -- the way things typically go, even if there is no rule about it. And each section is illustrated with an inside look at how its content applied in one of Peterson's languages, for the added buzz that may bring.
Now, I am an engelanger myself, with only minor excursions into artlangs of the sort that Peterson is describing, so I feel somewhat left out. But only somewhat, for Peterson's discussion of linguistics and the way languages actually work have great value for more outre' languages -- as something to NOT do, if nothing else, but mainly as a guide to a unified creation that might be learnable and speakable, while still performing some experimental task. Auxlangers, seeking an international auxiliary language, will be less left out, since they do look for some sort of naturalness along with universal appeal. And it is quite clear that Petersons's languages, however many people learn them to talk to khaleesi, are meant for their own cultures, not for ours.
If you are bitten by the desire to create a language, this is the easiest path to satisfying that urge> You may want to go to other works later, but this gives you the foundation and the direction you will need.
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