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.
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.
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.
I 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 :)
That'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
A 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.
you 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.
Exactly -- 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.
I don’t know much about film, but I can imagine someone saying the same thing about programming. We spend all this time building things that get replaced before they even ship. We celebrate programmers who remove more code than they add. Surely this is a huge waste that could be avoided with better planning?
Saying this as a software engineer that has been on movie sets - you have no idea how disorganised, chaotic, and wasteful they can be, and how long hanging is the low hanging fruit in terms of making processes more efficient.
While 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.
I 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.
By "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)
I'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.
(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 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.
Appslure 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/
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.
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.
The 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.
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."
I mean, filming on location as opposed to on a studio sound stage or lot has often been favored by audiences and directors for greater authenticity, even when it's Vancouver masquerading as another city or Tunisia masquerading as Tattoine. And I don't think anybody is suggesting that conlanging isn't "a legitimate artform like anything else," just that it's duplicating effort. Remember "don't repeat yourself"?
> 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
Interesting tidbit! I had thought they were all artificial.
Lojban is so big, you could create different cultures simply by omitting or making mandatory different bits. This group doesn't use rafsi but evidentials are mandatory; that group doesn't use any of the time-space marking but the other does, etc.
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.
It might encourage a few people to learn the real language spoken in the movie instead of a conlang which nobody ever spoke outside the movie. The time and effort expended by Star Trek fans learning Klingon might be better spent learning Basque, Cornish, Abkhaz, Etruscan, or Sumerian. They'd learn a language with speakers and/or literature, and if the language is still spoken contribute to its continuity.
This seems to be one of those "why don't you just be productive?" arguments, which tends to miss the point of why someone did something to begin with. There's a reason Star Trek fans learn Klingon and not a real language, they're fascinated with Klingons but not a real culture, so the energy to learn, say, Basque, was never there to begin with.
I feel similar with history, if I am just doing it for entertainment I'd much rather learn a constructed history rather than the real one.
But if Klingon had just been Basque, then they would have been learning two cultures at once. Ironically it's cultural hegemony from evil empires that real hurts these minority human languages.
Adding non-existent words to a language is not twisting it, it's developing it, like normal languages evolve over time. I'm assuming for any language that is chosen we would have enough writing to know the grammar and structures, so I feel like adding words is not a big deal. You did basically preserve a large part of the language though, even if it's had words added.
This is not correct. Language is much more than words. At times you have social structure encoded e.g. via honorifics. You have concepts and phrases that derive from previous experiences.
Whether you take Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for granted or you think that its inverse is true, cultures and languages codevelop.
You wouldn't say "keep them at the bay" in a language used by a land-locked people. You won't call tomato "pomodoro" if gold in your area doesn't have impurites that make it red and not yellow.
You have to understand that language on a very basic level is a construct of a culture that used it. You can't separate them.
And then there are practical reasons. You won't get actors to learn Mongolic language to play Dothraki. Conlangs aim to combine "alien" with "familiar" which is a must in a movie, game or a book.
> You wouldn't say "keep them at the bay" in a language used by a land-locked people.
If you mean to reference the expression “keep someone at bay” (no “the”) with the meaning of holding them back, that comes from “bay” as in “the howling bark of hounds” rather than “bay” as in “a partially enclosed body of water attached to a larger area”. Completely separate etymology (from old French «bay» and «baie», respectively, ending up in words that happen to be spelled the same in English.)
So, a fine idiom for a landlocked people, not so good for a people without dogs.
It seems more culture impacts language, you don't have social structures that are created in language and implemented in culture later. I agree it's a construct of culture though, but I don't know that adding words is necessarily bad.
Why would actors learn a language when they can just learn their lines? If you're already borrowing concepts from other languages why not the whole thing. I don't know if conlangs are better, but I don't think it would be unethical to use an existing ancient language for a movie or TV show.
> 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 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.])
Right; classically the counterpart to "you" in English would have been "usted" in Spanish. (Not really anymore, of course, since English doesn't use the formal/familiar distinction.)
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.
I am not a linguist too, I would really be interested on hearing feedback from a linguist.
Yes, most words were inspired form existing English words. The caesar transformation words were mostly transformed from English words, some using Indonesian, some Arabic, some Latin.
I tried not to create a whole new word, instead the idea of adopting some words from existing language were a common practice on any language that we have now, so I tried to adopt whenever possible and change the pronounciation.
Here's an example of some words that was not adopted from an existing language (or if there was similarities, it wasn't my intention):
- Vragel (soul)
- Serentia (eternal)
- Rus, Erus, Berus (the suffix used to implicate negativity, rus is least negative, erus is mid, berus is the most negative; e.g Vragelberus (to indicate a highly damaged, wicked, dangerous, or corrupted soul).
There's also some rule I used to create/adapt words, words that indicates greatness or something big always ends with the letter "A". E.g. Versila (universe), Elia (god), Alua (sky), Titania (giants), Manara (tower).
Name of places in the book also follows this rule. E.g Riddorana (place of huge waterfall), Zodiarchia (capital city), Altand (small ponds, note it doesn't end with an "A").
This rule allowed me to write poets that easily ended with the letter "A".
It is always interesting to learn words from existing language, then adopt it and learn how to make it fit with the existing language design.
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 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 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.
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'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.
79 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] threadYes, 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.
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.
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 :)
Much of the approach is explained in the DVD extras to the film, but is summarised on the film's Wikipedia[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mariachi#Production
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.
As long as everything goes up this is fine.
When things start to get flat, money will dry up.
Plus, once you have a language, you can translate an English script into it vs constantly making up (inconsistent) foreign dialogue as you go.
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)
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.
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.)
(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.)
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/
1: [https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/]
Hey, my linguistics degree had to be good for something.
A lot of those people are proud of their language and would like to see it live and thrive again.
[1] https://www.player.one/far-cry-primal-interview-how-ubisoft-...
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008
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."
Interesting tidbit! I had thought they were all artificial.
Bonus points if it's sold as random fantasy language of a strange country and the main cast doesn't understand it either.
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 feel similar with history, if I am just doing it for entertainment I'd much rather learn a constructed history rather than the real one.
Whether you take Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for granted or you think that its inverse is true, cultures and languages codevelop.
You wouldn't say "keep them at the bay" in a language used by a land-locked people. You won't call tomato "pomodoro" if gold in your area doesn't have impurites that make it red and not yellow.
You have to understand that language on a very basic level is a construct of a culture that used it. You can't separate them.
And then there are practical reasons. You won't get actors to learn Mongolic language to play Dothraki. Conlangs aim to combine "alien" with "familiar" which is a must in a movie, game or a book.
If you mean to reference the expression “keep someone at bay” (no “the”) with the meaning of holding them back, that comes from “bay” as in “the howling bark of hounds” rather than “bay” as in “a partially enclosed body of water attached to a larger area”. Completely separate etymology (from old French «bay» and «baie», respectively, ending up in words that happen to be spelled the same in English.)
So, a fine idiom for a landlocked people, not so good for a people without dogs.
Why would actors learn a language when they can just learn their lines? If you're already borrowing concepts from other languages why not the whole thing. I don't know if conlangs are better, but I don't think it would be unethical to use an existing ancient language for a movie or TV show.
https://reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8wjs73/is_there_a_cit...
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...
Yes, most words were inspired form existing English words. The caesar transformation words were mostly transformed from English words, some using Indonesian, some Arabic, some Latin.
I tried not to create a whole new word, instead the idea of adopting some words from existing language were a common practice on any language that we have now, so I tried to adopt whenever possible and change the pronounciation.
Here's an example of some words that was not adopted from an existing language (or if there was similarities, it wasn't my intention): - Vragel (soul) - Serentia (eternal) - Rus, Erus, Berus (the suffix used to implicate negativity, rus is least negative, erus is mid, berus is the most negative; e.g Vragelberus (to indicate a highly damaged, wicked, dangerous, or corrupted soul).
There's also some rule I used to create/adapt words, words that indicates greatness or something big always ends with the letter "A". E.g. Versila (universe), Elia (god), Alua (sky), Titania (giants), Manara (tower).
Name of places in the book also follows this rule. E.g Riddorana (place of huge waterfall), Zodiarchia (capital city), Altand (small ponds, note it doesn't end with an "A").
This rule allowed me to write poets that easily ended with the letter "A".
It is always interesting to learn words from existing language, then adopt it and learn how to make it fit with the existing language design.
I think you mean “vowel”, not “vocal”.
The language creator then back-fitted the made up gibberish into the language.
http://www.dothraki.com/2012/06/hash-yer-ast-fin/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
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?
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.
That's the basic plot of Arrival.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
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.
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
The community is also fascinating, with folks spending passionate decades on making languages - ex: ithkuil.