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Here's my take as a person with two linguistics degrees, one of which had a big computational focus on historical change: The person who constructed the langua

• euroderf 3y ago
  But then again there is the Mentat language that we hear Thufir Hawat use in the Lynch version. Has anyone bothered to analyze this and maybe expand upon it ?
• granzymes 3y ago
  On the other hand, the characters in Dune have almost no information about Earth. Over the mindbogglingly long time scale between our present day and the events in the books/films, it's not only possible but likely that almost all of those audiovisual aids have been lost.
  • rbanffy 3y ago
    Not necessarily lost, but certainly diluted by the content produced later. The lack of AI or even sophisticated computing creates a further problem in keeping that content indexed in ways that preserve its relevance and allow it to be surfaced. Another consideration is how suppressed previous knowledge was during the time the AI ruled over humans and how much was really lost during the Butlerian Jihad. I'm not sure the Dune universe is fully elaborated from our days, but I would assume that every early human colony established by sleeper ships or embryo carriers would have a curated subset of human culture selected for maximising colony success. With that kind of redundancy, it'd be difficult to completely eradicate such information.
• mr_toad 3y ago
  The Butlerian Jihad which destroyed all computers probably wiped out most audio visual media.
  • MarCylinder 3y ago
    This was my thought as well. Why are we assuming they'd even have access to many preserved audio recordings knowing that they destroyed all computers? The Butlerisn Jihad was thousands of years before the events of the movie.
  • Supermancho 3y ago
    Interestingly, there is an audio-visual device being used by Paul in the first movie. Thinking Machines were destroyed (and anything like them, to a degree), but humans still needed to communicate and travel to planets. The Butlerian Jihad was not about destroying all technology. The most devastating effect of the movement, was that most planets were largely governed by AI or less commonly cyborgs (cymeks). Rejection/Destruction of these machines left populations in utter chaos, from their managed state. Starvation, brutalism, etc. Imagine if any large country just stopped following a political and legal structure, eliminating anyone and anything who happened to support it. This was the cost of freeing humanity (according to the doctrine).
• sonicanatidae 3y ago
  Dune - Salusa Secundus https://i.imgur.com/ONFHF12.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/ONFHF12.jpeg
• boxed 3y ago
  It's ~26 thousand years into the future. Audio recordings aren't THAT strongly conservative on a language.
  • aeturnum 3y ago
    I think it's less that they're listening to old earth recodings on arrakis and more that having high quality linguistic capture like that allows linguistic forms to persist in a way they didn't before. They're listening to audio from 100 years ago, that sound like the audio from 100 years before that...etc.
  • ajross 3y ago
    We're crossing one century of audio reproduction now, and... it really seems pretty conservative. Play a radio show from 1920's middle America and there are almost no linguistically significant changes from modern American English. Almost all the change has been superficial stuff like idioms and choice of vocabulary. No vowel shifting, no new grammar (or lost grammar), new added or removed articles or prepositions, no new ways of expressing tense. I'm not a linguist, but over any other four generations you'd surely expect to see a lot of this stuff change.
    • philwelch 3y ago
      A century isn’t that long a period of time, and there are actually tons of small but noticeable changes in dialect between today and those old radio dramas that you probably just aren’t hearing.
      • ajross 3y ago
        Any examples? Again historically languages change much faster. Three and a half centuries were enough for a transition from Middle English (not remotely intelligible) through Chaucer (requires translation but you can see why it's the same language) to Shakespeare (we all read it as kids, merely "funny sounding").
        • 3y ago
• piombisallow 3y ago
  It's obviously a political decision to remove the Arabic from the movies, especially as it deals with religious war and extremists. The linguistic explanation is dress-up.
  • DinaCoder99 3y ago
    > It's obviously a political decision to remove the Arabic from the movies, especially as it deals with religious war and extremists. Which is absolutely ridiculous given how much they've taken from MENA countries visually—the most shallow kind of appropriation when it comes to movies.
    • seper8 3y ago
      Did you ever read the books? Ofcourse they were inspired by MENA people considering many of them live in the desert too with traces of tribalism and colonialism... One mans "Cultural Appropriation" is another man's "Cultural Appreciation". I'm guessing you're just another Caucasian liberal living in Seattle or California who's acting insulted on behalf of MENA people?
      • DinaCoder99 3y ago
        Yes, of course, what do you think I'm contrasting the current situation to? Adopting the aesthetics of a people but not their actual culture is a fairly common understanding of what cultural appropriation is. Frank Herbert at least had some fairly interesting commentary about culture that is easily confused with endorsing fetishization of cultures at first glance, but if you read all the books it's clear he meant it as damning criticism. I'm excited to see the movie—this is incredibly bland criticism compared to what other have to say about the movie. Still, if you love something, you're honest about it. > One mans "Cultural Appropriation" is another man's "Cultural Appreciation". Uh, sure, if you just want to throw the entire concept of discourse out the window.
        • seper8 3y ago
          So are you from a MENA country or not?
• BirAdam 3y ago
  David Peterson is paid to make languages for a living and has made many. He’s excellent at it. More importantly, he doesn’t get to do whatever he wants. Sometimes, he’s told to keep to source material, and other times he isn’t. In the end, however, he’s delivering a product to a paying customer. I met him once a linguistics conference, and he’s a sharp guy from what I gathered. Before making claims about what he did or why he did, you should look him up. He too has degrees, but that shouldn’t make a difference. He’s created a wide variety of languages for many different projects, he founded the language creation society, and in general he gets extremely familiar with the source material for each project in which he’s involved. He’s not a huckster, and he definitely doesn’t focus on marketability of his work beyond his direct customer (though his customers may, but that ain’t on him).
  • light_hue_1 3y ago
    He's not a huckster. I know some of the conlang crowd including him. What he is, is obsessed with a particular idea of how realistic the process of creating conlangs must be. And in what sense that process must be realistic. Instead of creating languages that please the audience, he creates languages that please the hardcore conlang community. I get it. As a language geek the results are pleasing. As a Dune fan he did the book and fandom a great disservice and that sucks. He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune. Sometimes realism makes something feel more real and tangible. But at other times it makes it feel pointlessly inaccessible. What's better? One kind of realism for language geeks or the integrity of the author's vision for the story? There's a clear answer for him. You can only appreciate his work and his choices if you dig deep. And virtually no one does. Even hardcore fans. There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it. Just like say Hebrew. Or he could declare that it became a liturgical language like Latin or Vedic Sanskrit and so remained unchanged. But that's not language geek fun. Also his example of Beowulf is, as someone who has published many papers and also taught linguistics, just stupid. That didn't happen to Hebrew or Greek or many other languages. English went through a massive lexicon, grammar, and pronounciation shift right after it. That was an abrupt non linear change in the language. In any case, with just a little practice you can read it far better than you might think. It's also just false that words can't be observed long periods. Reconstructions of proto-indo-european show that very likely quite a few words hardly changd. It's really sad that so many projects are picking only him, just like countless movies pick only a few musicians for their scores. The community is large and there are a lot of curious viewpoints and ideas out there.
• philwelch 3y ago
  > What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. So for instance, while there is a large variety of English dialects in the US, "Broadcast English" and "General American" are quite stable and broadly available. Is this true? I don’t think it is. Go watch or listen to some audiovisual records from not even a century ago, like a classic Hollywood film or one of the old WWII training films on YouTube for instance. If you listen for it, you will hear a dialectical drift.
  • iopq 3y ago
    Yes, but they are perfectly understandable. Compare to Chinese, where dialects that separated a few hundred years ago are not mutually intelligible. I mean like, different Hakka dialects that arose two hundred years ago are not understandable to each other. 1800s English is Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, etc. Imagine the language changed so much you can't understand any of it
    • philwelch 3y ago
      English also has mutually unintelligible dialects that arose within the past few hundred years. That’s an entirely different question than the question of whether a native speaker of a “standard” dialect can understand older “standard” dialects.
      • simonh 3y ago
        True this. In the 1990s I visited California and I had to walk out of a sandwich shop because I could not make out a single word the kid behind the counter was saying (Brit with a BBC English accent). There's not one American accent, there are dozens of them, and some of them are very challenging for me. To be fair though, part of that could be influence and merging with other languages brought in my immigrant communities from Europe over the last few hundred years.
        • iopq 3y ago
• Nursie 3y ago
  > What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. We can observe in English that this sort of effect has happened with the advent of the printed word - I've certainly read before that Shakespeare effectively codified the English language, not just by giving us lots of words and sayings, but by causing a de-facto standardisation by becoming widespread. And while the language has moved on since then, and added a multitude of new words and phrase, the structure appears to have moved more slowly than it did before this time. > It robs something from the original text Eh, it's a while since I've read the original text, but Villeneuve's adaptation of part 1 left me cold anyway. It's a shame, this might be the last big-budget attempt at making a Dune movie, but to me it was hollow and dead. So if they've changed the language the Fremen speak, it's one of the lesser flaws.
• z2 3y ago
  Assuming some thought was given here, I wonder if the Mandarin Chinese used by Yueh in the first movie was meant to be movie magic like with the use of English, or was there a conscious decision to keep it completely frozen over the millennia?
• mancerayder 3y ago
  >one of which had a big computational focus on historical change: Is this by any chance the 'clock' of phonetic change in a language, and its use in predicting what an ancient language may have sounded like? I.e. Proto Indo-European? I'm a total linguistics amateur but fascinated by the field and bits of knowledge I pick up.