13 ms·
Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)
- ggambetta 8y agoI guess this partially explains why making a movie or TV episode can cost millions / hundreds of millions of dollars :-/ Yes, Dothraki being an actual language is probably "better" than Leia speaking gibberish to Jabba, but to me it feels like it's way past the point of diminishing returns.
- eafkuor 8y agoHonestly paying this guy to invent a language mustn't have been that expensive. It's just one extra salary in a show that employs hundreds/thousands of people. And I think these details help create a stronger following, because nerds love this kind of stuff. The community behind the Dark Souls games for example wouldn't be the same without all the secrets in those games.
- ghaff 8y agoSee also the articles about the level of detail in the costumes in Game of Thrones. There is a lot of attention to detail, probably including a fair bit that doesn't make it on camera, in big budget video/film productions. You could probably cut a lot of it and still have a "pretty good" final product. But being obsessive about detail rather than being content with good enough in all sorts of aspects of production, including the acting, is one of the things that separate competent shows from really good ones.
- ggambetta 8y agoI get that. But spending a lot of money on things that don't make it to the final cut always felt like a waste to me. I'm very very marginally into filmmaking (see bio), and I've always had the impression that costs and time could be cut drastically just with better planning. I often wonder what would happen if you applied startup principles to making a movie. Thinking in terms of MVP, customer value, efficiency, on top of the artistic vision. This is not just talk, I'm putting my ideas to practice by producing two zero-budget feature films with an extremely lean mentality. Let's see how they turn out :)
- de_watcher 8y agoReminds me of "The Matrix" with detailed sketches of how exactly should it look.
- magic_beans 8y agoMost movies do this. See: http://www.storyboardsinc.com/news/archives/2274 http://www.storyboardsinc.com/news/archives/2274
- laumars 8y agoThat's called a story board. As far as I'm aware all movies and a fair few TV shows do this because it's cheaper to sketch your idea out before you hire expensive camera crew, lighting, etc
- ghaff 8y agoA lot of effort (and lots of time) can go into the development of a show or film. Yes, it can cost quite a bit of money in absolute terms to go through multiple rewrites, conceptual development, storyboards, screen tests, etc.--sometimes over the course of years--but it's still generally dirt cheap compared to the daily costs once you flip on the production switch.
- Quarrelsome 8y agoyou don't know what's gonna make the final cut though. Stuff like language creation is super early on in the process at which point you're trying to engineer a system for success. It makes sense because you don't know what you're gonna end up with and overshooting is better than missing.
- DanAndersen 8y agoExactly -- that was part of the mindset behind Weta when they were working on the Lord of the Rings movies. They rejected the attitude of avoiding detail "because no one would see it anyway," because putting in that detail would then open up flexibility in terms of what shots could actually be done, because there was the confidence that whatever they made would hold up.
- saiya-jin 8y agoWhile it makes sense to give attention to details, I see too much detail put into things without any effect on the result. Movies are primarily about good acting and scripts. One could slash budget significantly and still have the same final product. I wonder how much effort studios do in this space. One example - GoT - their costumes have details ie in sewing that you can only see when somebody takes a camera and shoots it up close on purpose. It will never be visible in show, not even in 4k and huge screens. Shows/movies moved past realism with how good dress/weapons/decorations looked in the past. If you visit any medieval castle, the stuff for kings and queens pales with what even mediocre TV shows can produce.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoIf there is a lot of money, people will spend it. As long as everything goes up this is fine. When things start to get flat, money will dry up.
- endtime 8y agoI don't know the first thing about filmmaking, and my terminology will probably be wrong, but...my uninformed speculation is that creating coherent, consistent, high quality raw material gives the editors (or whoever) freedom to compose the best final cut.
- robbiemitchell 8y agoI don’t see how this explains those massive costs. It’s one salary out of hundreds of millions, and it’s a one-time investment. Plus, once you have a language, you can translate an English script into it vs constantly making up (inconsistent) foreign dialogue as you go.
- ygra 8y agoWell, the language is extended as needed, so it's still making up foreign words as you go. They just have to fit into the language properly.
- ggambetta 8y agoBy "partially explains" I meant that if you spend money in this kind of thing, minor details that sometimes don't even end on the final cut, the costs can add up. I'm wondering to what extent the producers get good value for their money, or whether the Pareto principle applies here - is it possible to make something 80% as good for 20% of the cost, by focusing on the 20% that matters? For an extreme example, think Transformers, where hundreds of millions and dollars can't save bad writing. Making things better at the screenplay level is probably much more cost-effective than spending millions in VFX (or, in this case, creating a full language where subtitled not-entirely-random gibberish would probably do)
- ghaff 8y agoI'd say Transformers did a pretty good job of doing what it set out to do (make money) even if you and I don't care for it :-) Certainly there are good "little" movies that get made on a relative shoestring. And even more shorts and arthouse fare. And modern video equipment makes it a lot easier to mostly use natural lighting and the like. That said, mainstream TV and movies have made most of our standards pretty high. I'm always somewhat amazed by how much gear gets brought in by a video crew to shoot a few minutes of talking heads to use on a company web site.
- majewsky 8y ago> think Transformers, where hundreds of millions and dollars can't save bad writing The box office result says otherwise. (Note: I'm explicitly making an economical argument, not an artistic one, since that's what the thread focuses on.)
- wool_gather 8y agoFor another famous conlang, there's a cool video where Mark Okrand discusses the process of inventing Klingon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Did-eVQDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Did-eVQDc (He also briefly talks about the Vulcan language at the beginning.) What's interesting here is that he was brought in for the third Star Trek movie. But there was already a small amount of spoken Klingon in the first movie, created by James Doohan. So Okrand, while he was tasked with actually inventing the language, felt constrained by continuity. He discusses trying to rationalize the preexisting bits and then extend the language coherently. (And his enthusiasm is really clear. It's fun to listen to someone smart talk about something they're really excited by.)
- DanAndersen 8y agoThe question of continuity is an interesting one. There was a similar issue for the recent Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, where some of Tolkien's languages are very fragmentary but there was a desire to have more invented speech. David Salo is a Tolkien scholar who was brought onto the film team to help expand some of Tolkien's conlangs for use in the film. While his work isn't strictly "canonical," he did do a lot of serious work to make his additions fit into what fragments we have. His blog is a good read: https://midgardsmal.com/ https://midgardsmal.com/
- durzagott 8y agoIf you're ever interested in doing this yourself, I recommend /r/Conlangs at Reddit[1]. Lots of good tips with a friendly community. 1: [https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/]
- classichasclass 8y agoI always theorised there was some extra-auditory or human-inaudible cues in Ubese (Boushh) that filled in the gaps. After all, the only individuals responding directly were non-human: Jabba (who probably could understand, but choose to use C-3PO for egomaniacal and/or ceremonial reasons) and of course old Goldenrod himself. Hey, my linguistics degree had to be good for something.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- appslure 8y agoAppslure is a Delhi based Professional Website Development and Design Company. Our Web Developers and designers are expert in responsive, custom and e-commerce web development and Designing services. For more visit on- http://www.appslure.com/web-development/ http://www.appslure.com/web-development/
- lazyjones 8y agoI wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced gibberish for movies. We could preserve languages for posteriority and the result would be more realistic.
- icebraining 8y agoAnd be accused of cultural appropriation?
- dalbasal 8y agoSometimes they do. Also, an interest in one seems to closely overlap an interest in the other.
- mihaifm 8y agoI can give you a really good example of that. The languages created for FarCry Primal are based on Proto-Indo-European [1]. I didn't know that at the time I was playing the game, but the more I played the more I got captivated by those languages, since a lot of words sounded familiar. And indeed after doing the research I discovered that they are based on the real ancestor for Indo-European languages. Congrats to Ubisoft for pulling this off. [1] https://www.player.one/far-cry-primal-interview-how-ubisoft-brought-ancient-languages-back-life-513075 https://www.player.one/far-cry-primal-interview-how-ubisoft-...
- jdmichal 8y agoThe movie Prometheus was also somewhat famous in linguistics circles for attempting to use either reconstructed PIE directly or potentially a modified proto-Sanskrit for the Engineer. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008
- adityapurwa 8y agoI am writing a book that also has its own language called Erksar, the language was once a simple modified caesar crypto where I map vocal with another vocal (as a software engineer, it was pretty easy to create translator for it). “I love you” would become “E rufa tu” (it should be “E rufa tui” but I modified the result and tried to remove unnecessary letter). Now that I lost the original character map, some new words is not generated via the translator, but adapted from existing language. E.g “Versila” is adaptation of “Universe”, it also has this unique words connector to refer to: of, on, in, at, from, to, the. E.g “vi Avaga vi Posphora” which means “from Avaga to Posphora”, how we know which one is from and which one is to is the grammar rule. From always used at the beginning, it is impossible to say “to Posphora from Avaga” because the grammar rule says so. The language keeps evolving as I continue writing the book.
- jgust 8y agoI found it amusing that "you" translated to "tu" (or tú) which is "you" in Spanish.
- krat0sprakhar 8y ago“Tu” is also "you" in Hindi.
- fusiongyro 8y agoThese are all Indo-European languages; English once had forms of "you" like this: thou/thee.
- kerng 8y agoCorrect. In German its "du" if I remember right.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoAs the singular, with you/ye as the plural. (Then later you was used as the formal form with thou as the familiar, like French's tu vs vous, and then later the informal thou/thee fell out of the use. [And new plural forms were innovated, e.g. youse, y'all etc.])
- pablobaz 8y agoAn interesting anecdote is when the producers couldn't contact the language creator and had to make up a line on the spot. The language creator then back-fitted the made up gibberish into the language. http://www.dothraki.com/2012/06/hash-yer-ast-fin/ http://www.dothraki.com/2012/06/hash-yer-ast-fin/
- da_chicken 8y agoEr, wrong link?
- pablobaz 8y agoThanks - fixed
- skrause 8y agoThere is also a 2 hour long podcast interview with this guy: http://omegataupodcast.net/276-linguistics-conlangers-and-game-of-thrones-dothraki/ http://omegataupodcast.net/276-linguistics-conlangers-and-ga...
- leeoniya 8y agoanother great read abouth Ikthuil: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
- bloopernova 8y agoSee Also: The Expanse's Lang Belta, or "Belter Creole" Created for the book by Nick Farmer with the authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, he then coached the actors and extended the language for the TV show. Here's something from wired on that creation process: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-expanse-belter-language/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-expanse-belter-language/ This is also fun, Belter Creole words and their origins: http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books) http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books) pretty cool, sa-sa ke?
- netgusto 8y agoAn analysis about the Star Wars Ubese language : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bnBqXQ1DE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bnBqXQ1DE8
- princeb 8y agoI don't read a lot of books with invented languages, but a number that I've seen seem somewhat European. I don't remember very many Sinitic constructed languages. I think that would be nice, but the nature of the language conveys information about the culture and the society that speaks it. a reader would naturally see a Sinitic language and picture a culture that is Sinitic, even if the author did not intend it that way. so the style of the constructed language is restricted to history as it has evolved in our world, and not the fictional world the author builds. to push even further, how would one imagine an alien language where the organisms do not speak through mouth-like organs? what if they made noises through all their pores in their skin? or non-auditory communication like colour coded messages in their eyes? what if aliens had no mouth or eyes in the first place? or skin? what if aliens spoke in methods that did not require passage of time... i.e. the entire message flash out in a single packet of information? I guess these methods of communication wouldn't allow a story to be told in a way that is familiar to typical human story telling and would thus be uninteresting. but would be nice to imagine regardless.
- jimbokun 8y ago"to push even further, how would one imagine an alien language where the organisms do not speak through mouth-like organs?" That's the basic plot of Arrival. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
- Kalium 8y agoI think a lot of authors use a conlang to add a touch of the exotic to their work, but also try to keep it from being too unfamiliar. A confused reader is generally one who has been knocked out of the narrative flow. I've read SF works in which light-based and even scent-based languages are posited. Authors don't always use this as anything other than background color in their universe, though.
- thfuran 8y agoPandora's Star has a species that communicates by luminescence outside the (human) visible spectrum.
- zhengyi13 8y ago
- dschuetz 8y agoThe article is not about How To Invent a Language, but rather about the book that guy wrote.
- max_ 8y agoThanks for posting
- sriku 8y agoI've found Mark Rosenfelder's books "the language construction kit" and "the advanced LCK" fascinating to see how much thought needs to go into a language. I felt I learnt more about existing languages from those books than actual language books. He deals with everything - from syntax to phonology to script. LoTR was the book that drew me to conlangs in the first place though. The community is also fascinating, with folks spending passionate decades on making languages - ex: ithkuil.