Game of Thrones language wizard David J. Peterson chats up a Reddit AMA

The guy responsible for crafting the Dothraki and Valyrian languages, David J. Peterson, recently popped in for a Reddit AMA discussion and fielded a bunch of pretty interesting questions, including ones about how he names curse words after people he dislikes and overcoming issues of time depth and language development in the history of the show. Peterson told everyone to feel free to ask anything they wish, but he might not be able to answer certain questions due to spoilers.

First of all, building entire languages isn’t easy or fast:

"I mean right now Dothraki has 4,000 words. A language like English has hundreds of thousands. Even a language that has had little contact with the outside world will have upwards of a hundred thousand words. It’d take decades to create that many. I’m working on it! But don’t get your hopes up. I’ll be happy if Dothraki and Valyrian each get 10,000 words before I’m dead."

Peterson was asked about a statement he made in 2013 commenting on how he helped George R.R. Martin with some language translation work for The Winds of Winter.

"I think he’s annoyed with me for even saying that I translated stuff for him. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if he doesn’t use it and makes up something totally incongruous to punish me. :("

So there you have it. People will speak Dothraki in The Winds of Winter. Tell your friends.

And on the subject of how time changes, or would change, languages in Westeros and beyond:

"Regarding the time depth, though, that’s always been a much tougher thing (for language) than the distance in the books. In 5,000 years, the Valyrian language would be absolutely unrecognizable. Yet we have people in Slaver’s Bay who speak both…? And they all kind of understand each other? It’s…impossible. One has to ignore the time depth completely. I imagine one could do the same with distance."

Are you a Dothraki numbers fan? Here is the date 12/3/2015 as it would be spoken by Khal Drogo:

• 12 = akatthi
• 3 = sen
• 2015 = akat dalen ma mekthi

David did a post on Dothraki numbers here.

Ends up that Peterson is responsible for more than just Dothraki and Valyrian. He also helped craft the language, such as it is, spoken by the giants:

"I really took to heart what GRRM said about the giants not being all that smart. The language…is about as simple grammatically as it gets (no inflection; inconsistent orderings; no numbers above two). Humans, on the other hand, speak languages of equal complexity, so the goal when creating a language for humans is to create one that is precisely as complex as the human languages on Earth.It’s kind of like this: The Wildlings and giants speak the same language in the same way that American adults and four year olds speak English. You wouldn’t say the children weren’t speaking English, but clearly they haven’t mastered it. That’s the case with the Old Tongue. It was very difficult to do something for the giants because there is no Old Tongue (I haven’t been contracted to create it yet). I created things for the language that left me plenty of room for expansion in case I do get to create it one day. I have an idea for how the Old Tongue will work if I get to give it a full treatment."

If we ever go further north of the Wall, the Old Tongue could get more play, and Peterson would get more work.

If you’re cooking anything in a mixing bowl, Peterson shows you how to make your fellow Game of Thrones fans/dinner guests jealous:

". . . if you want a word for a large mixing bowl in Dothraki, it’s ‘igasof.’ You can use one of those for making brownies! ~:D"

I’ d really like to see what Dothraki brownies would look like.

If he could turn back time, Peterson would change the spelling of one very well known GoT word:

"I would change the Dothraki spelling of “khaleesi” to khalisi. That ship has sailed, though."

And on how he got the job:

". . . there was a contest to design the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones. I competed with other language creators and won out after two rounds of judging. That’s how I got the job. :)"

If you’d like to have a job like David’s, you ‘ll have to brush up on a few more foreign languages than most of us studied in high school.

"I’ve studied the following languages in chronological order: Latin (self-study), German (1 year), Arabic (1 year), Russian (1 semester), French (1 semester), Esperanto (1 semester), Middle Egyptian (1 semester), Hawaiian (self-study), Turkish (self-study), ASL (1 semester), Moro (fieldwork), Swahili (self-study), Siglitun/Uummarmiut (self-study), Akkadian (self-study), Attic Greek (self-study), Modern Greek (self-study), Hindi (self-study), Japanese (self-study), Finnish (self-study).I majored in English and Linguistics at UC Berkeley, and then got my MA in Linguistics from UC San Diego. I’ve been creating languages ever since I was a sophomore at Berkeley, though."

David goes on to talk about how he has stayed close to the Dothraki language as GRRM presents it in the books, but oh, that one name!

"Dothraki certainly couldn’t be as exotic, for lack of a better word, than it could have been. Based on what’s in the books, it’s a fairly plain SVO inflectional language, much like the Romance languages. It could’ve been lots of other things, but that’s what’s in the books, so that’s what I stuck to. And regarding khaleesi, I decided to treat his spellings as infallible, so if it’s spelled different (e.g. ee vs. i) it’s pronounced different. I should’ve ignored it for that word and that word only, though. Oh well."

Who came up with the idea to create entirely new languages for a television show? David is quick to credit David Benioff and D.B. Weiss:

"It’s still amazing to me that D&D decided themselves that they wanted to have a language created for Game of Thrones. This is not the type of thing that occurred to showrunners. It does now, but that’s entirely because of Game of Thrones."

There is plenty more of this discussion to explore on the Reddit platform, but let’s finish with how much money it would take to make David eat a raw, beating horse heart:

"Interesting question…For me, I know how much money it would take for me to say I was going to do it (probably around $5 million), but to actually finish it?! I’m not sure I could actually stomach it—not even for a $1 billion. I mean, my gag reflex doesn’t give a fuck about money."

Spoken like a man who can speak Dothraki, but chooses not to eat like one!

If you’d like to know, David’s favorite real earth language is Hawaiian. David also works on the CW’s The 100 and MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles and published his book The Art of Language Invention last year.

You can find the entire Reddit AMA transcript here.