I 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.
By that logic, movies should just use existing props or set designs rather than creating any new artifacts.
Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.
However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of the things that was great about, for example, the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).
Similarly, the video game Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."
You would not be preserving anything, you'd be stomping on a culture. Old and lesser known languages are rarely well researched. You're lucky if you have morphosyntax written down.
But the moment you start using existing language in a new context, you get into issues. You've got words and whole concepts missing that you have to add to something that's more or less complete.
Dothraki needs horse-related words. You need to be able to express certain social concepts that are unique to this fantasy culture.
So you set up to build this words and phrases. You derive phonotactics of a real language and patch it with your stuff. Now you've got new language based on an existing one. So you didn't preserve anything. And if I were a user of the originl lang, I'd be upset you appropriated and twisted it.
I 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.
> I wish they‘d use real, dying or dead languages instead of inventing advanced gibberish for movies.
John Kani, a veteran South African actor playing King T'Chaka in the Marvel movies "Captain America: Civil War" and "Black Panther", decided to speak the Wankandan language parts in Xhosa, a South African language that he is a native speaker of. He taught the rest of the cast their lines. I think it sounded realistic.
I 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.
As I understand things (not a linguist), that's not actually a different language than English, though it's a neat exercise. The English language has undergone all sorts of pronunciation shifts over time, it seems like you've imposed a new pronunciation map on an existing language, but the grammatical structure should be preserved.
(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.)
The 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/
I 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.
See 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.
Honestly 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.
I 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.
I don't recall anything Sinitic either, but it's not all an Indo-European game, at least :)
Khuzdul (the Dwarves' language in The Lord Of The Rings) is not well fleshed out, but was somewhat inspired by Semitic languages, in so far as it had tri-consonantal roots.
Klingon was created by a guy well versed in Native American language, and I think I recall reading was somewhat inspired by Inuit's agglutinative grammar.
I 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.
See 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.
I'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.
I 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.
[+] [-] pablobaz|7 years ago|reply
The language creator then back-fitted the made up gibberish into the language.
http://www.dothraki.com/2012/06/hash-yer-ast-fin/
[+] [-] da_chicken|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanAndersen|7 years ago|reply
Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.
However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of the things that was great about, for example, the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).
Similarly, the video game Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."
[+] [-] DominikD|7 years ago|reply
But the moment you start using existing language in a new context, you get into issues. You've got words and whole concepts missing that you have to add to something that's more or less complete.
Dothraki needs horse-related words. You need to be able to express certain social concepts that are unique to this fantasy culture.
So you set up to build this words and phrases. You derive phonotactics of a real language and patch it with your stuff. Now you've got new language based on an existing one. So you didn't preserve anything. And if I were a user of the originl lang, I'd be upset you appropriated and twisted it.
[+] [-] mihaifm|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.player.one/far-cry-primal-interview-how-ubisoft-...
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|7 years ago|reply
John Kani, a veteran South African actor playing King T'Chaka in the Marvel movies "Captain America: Civil War" and "Black Panther", decided to speak the Wankandan language parts in Xhosa, a South African language that he is a native speaker of. He taught the rest of the cast their lines. I think it sounded realistic.
https://www.thesouthafrican.com/john-kani-influenced-the-bla...
https://qz.com/1192662/black-panther-wakandas-language-is-is...
[+] [-] icebraining|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdmichal|7 years ago|reply
https://reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8wjs73/is_there_a_cit...
[+] [-] throwvondannen|7 years ago|reply
Bonus points if it's sold as random fantasy language of a strange country and the main cast doesn't understand it either.
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adityapurwa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbrown|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgust|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|7 years ago|reply
I think you mean “vowel”, not “vocal”.
[+] [-] wool_gather|7 years ago|reply
(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|7 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] ggambetta|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eafkuor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|7 years ago|reply
Plus, once you have a language, you can translate an English script into it vs constantly making up (inconsistent) foreign dialogue as you go.
[+] [-] durzagott|7 years ago|reply
1: [https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/]
[+] [-] princeb|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
That's the basic plot of Arrival.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
[+] [-] zhengyi13|7 years ago|reply
Khuzdul (the Dwarves' language in The Lord Of The Rings) is not well fleshed out, but was somewhat inspired by Semitic languages, in so far as it had tri-consonantal roots.
Klingon was created by a guy well versed in Native American language, and I think I recall reading was somewhat inspired by Inuit's agglutinative grammar.
Oh, and Laadan, an attempt at a conciously different perspective in language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Láadan
[+] [-] Kalium|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrause|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloopernova|7 years ago|reply
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/
This is also fun, Belter Creole words and their origins: http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books)
pretty cool, sa-sa ke?
[+] [-] sriku|7 years ago|reply
The community is also fascinating, with folks spending passionate decades on making languages - ex: ithkuil.
[+] [-] classichasclass|7 years ago|reply
Hey, my linguistics degree had to be good for something.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dschuetz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netgusto|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeoniya|7 years ago|reply
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
[+] [-] max_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] appslure|7 years ago|reply
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