Many of you who are checking this out might not know who David J. Peterson is by name, but you certainly know of his work. In his career he has created languages for HBO’s Game of Thrones, Syfy’s Defiance, Syfy’s Dominion, the CW’s Star-Crossed, the CW’s The 100, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles, NBC’s Emerald City, and Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World. I got to sit down with the author to chat about his work and career. I truly recommend listening to the podcast as we geek out about language and its forms, but here are some brief highlights.
Making a Language
To us ley people, creating a whole new language can seem like rocket science, but David says it’s really all about 3 things: grammar, lexicon, and phenology, with grammar being the core of the language. From speaking to sign language, everything has meaning or is encoded with things that have meaning. You need the lexicon and phenology to know what is happening but the grammar is the glue. For all of his projects he creates a massive reference index/dictionary where he rights down how everything works and the exceptions, as well as the language to English, which can really help the translation process.
The Difficulty of Making Languages
One of the main challenges of crafting a language is that you can’t skimp out on the work it takes. Making a language “Simple” isn’t really possible because the complexity shows up somewhere. We chatted about the differences in conjugating in Spanish, which compares to High Valeryian in that there are many ways to conjugate but there are singular meanings. In something like The Shanarra Chronicles, there’s only two verb tenses, but with many auxillary words that make for multiple meanings.
Game of Thrones and the Dothraki Language
How do you say kick the bucket in Dothraki? Questions similar to these are what David has to think about when creating languages and translating scripts. While there are many phrases and sayings that make sense in English, Peterson spoke about how these don’t directly translate. So while there’s not a direct correlation, the Dothraki do have an understanding of dying and death, so he just has to find the wording in their language for phrases and sayings that are tough. The process of translating, and the actors saying the lines, has become a smooth process. David gets the scripts and translates the lines, and also records an mp3 of how the lines can be spoken, so that the actors have something to work off of.
His Favorite Language and What He Would Have Loved to Work On
As you see above, David has worked on a lot of big shows and movies. While all of these projects hold a special place in his heart, Defiance is the one that took the cake. In terms of shows he’d love to have worked on David remarked that either Avatar The Last Airbender of The Legend of Korra are two he would have loved to work on.
Here’s the full audio:
You can also check out David’s website The Art of Language Invention and his wonderful Youtube channel.