Hi everybody.
Hello. I have cue cards. Hi. Welcome to the
first of a series of events celebrating
the 50th anniversary of the founding of
both the Department of linguistics and
the linguistics language program here at
UCSD. Yay!
So by way of introduction of our invited
panelists I'd like to say a few words
about the relationship between the study
of linguistics and the creation of
constructed languages which is of course
the topic of tonight's events. Before I
begin that though if anybody needs sign
language interpreting, we invite you to
sit over here in the front two rows,
there's some extra seats if anybody
needs sign language interpreting. Okay so
a question of specific interest to
academic linguists is what does it take
to describe a language, and a parallel
question for constructed language
creators - or conlangers as they're
called - is what does it take to create a
language and I think the answer to these
questions is mutually informative. The
study of linguistics has involved the
description of many languages which has
led to the development of theories
designed to explain how languages work
how they're structured how they're
acquired how they evolve over time and
so on. So for instance we know that
languages aren't just bags of words -
instead they're intricately structured
so for instance sentences consists of
words arranged in particular orders and
they vary systematically across sentence
types. So in English for instance "you
have eaten a sandwich" is a statement and
"have you eaten a sandwich" with the have
and the you reversed in order is a
question. Even the individual words of a
language are structured they're not just
random sequences of sounds so native
English speakers know that a word like
group is a real word of English a word
like gloop probably isn't but it could
be and a word like gnoop definitely isn't
we also know that language learners are
provided almost exclusively within
direct scattered and in many ways
incomplete evidence for all of this
structure but that they nevertheless
acquire all of the structure anyway. This
means that the process of language
acquisition must actually be kind of a
language creation process. Language
learners indirectly infer the structure
or created based on the fragmented
experience with that they have with what
is spoken around them. Now conlangers and our three guests
tonight in particular - I didn't ask them
if they all self-identify as conlangers,
but I'm just gonna go ahead and
call them that anyway - they're very
familiar with what academic linguists
have learned about real languages
because they have spent time being
academic linguists and I've used that
knowledge to inform the creation of
their constructed languages something
we're sure to hear a lot about tonight.
Now as it happens some academic
linguists have also stolen or borrowed
conlanger methods for our own needs so
there's a very promising area of
research in linguistics today
that's called artificial language
learning in which experimental subjects -
you may have been some of them - are
exposed to training data in a language
that has been carefully constructed to
reveal several things about how
languages work and then you're tested on
further items to see if you have learned
something about this. Now the results
from these experiments are very
interesting, but the artificial languages
themselves in the context of the
experiment are not very interesting at
least for the purposes of something like
tonight. They're certainly not as
interesting as the languages that have
been constructed by these three
linguists that we'll be discussing
tonight in particular because they're
associated with a people, usually an
alien race which is always exciting a
culture and of course Hollywood. So our
first guest tonight is Marc Okrand, a UC
alumnus through and through having
received his bachelor's degree in
linguistics from UC Santa Cruz and his
PhD in linguistics from UC Berkeley. Marc
is the creator of Klingon which was
created specifically for the Star Trek
movies and
no, right here
all right so you're probably all
familiar with Star Trek then I take it
okay now of course Klingon has sort of
taken on the life of its own in our own
universe extending well beyond the
confines of Star Trek and something that
I think you'll really appreciate from
the following clip.
[Klingon]
[Klingon]
Mark wants to know if he should
apologize for that. By the way that's
the first link that I found when I
googled Klingon language. Alright our
second guest is Paul Frommer who holds a
bachelor's degree in mathematics from
the University of Rochester and a PhD in
linguistics from the University of
Southern California
Now Paul is the creator of Na'vi for the
movie Avatar and more recently of
Barsoomian
of the movie John Carter, and this video
clip from Avatar illustrates Na'vi
Or it would if it worked
-What are you? -I was a Marine, a warrior of the jarhead clan.
[Na'vi]
[Na'vi]
[Na'vi]
[Na'vi]
Our third guest is David Peterson
another through and through UC alumnus
who holds bachelor degrees in English
and linguistics from UC Berkeley and a
master's degree in linguistics from
right here at UC San Diego
now David is co-founder and president of
the language creation Society and is the
creator of Dothraki for the HBO series
Game of Thrones and he's also now the
alien language and culture consultant -
how awesome is that? -
for the sci-fi original series Defiance
that just began airing this week. Here's
a clip from Game of Thrones.
-you don't need to see this  -blood of my
blood
-who did this? -Khal pono perhaps called
Jia gone they don't like the idea of a
woman leading a khalasar  -they will like
it far that's when I have done with them
[Dothraki]
[Dothraki]
Now that that last line wasn't
translated but I think it was "aaaaa"
Our moderator tonight is Grant
Goodall yet another through-and-through
UC alumnus with a bachelor's degree in
linguistics from UCLA and a PhD in
linguistics from UC San Diego
so Grant is professor of linguistics and
director of the linguistics language
program here and for reasons that will
become apparent shortly he is the
perfect person to be moderating this
panel discussion. So here's how is it how
it's going to go: after some introductory
remarks from our moderator Grant, the
panelists will discuss matters related
to the topic of language creation for
about 45 minutes
led by questions from the moderator, then
we'll invite questions from the audience
for about another 30 minutes and we'll
conclude and all stick around for a
reception. so enjoy.
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
[Grant speaking Esperanto]
In case you didn't catch all that, I just said
hello to you among other things in
Klingon and I don't know a lot about
Klingon culture but I gather that if
someone greets you and Klingon you
probably don't want to be rude so you
would probably so someone tells you
"nuk nek," you probably want to respond
with "nuk nek" so let's try this again. "nuk nek"
All right and the Navi people
at least are sometimes more gentle and
understanding - they didn't maybe look
like it in that clip, but in any event a
one wants to be gentle and understanding
in return so if someone tells you "gal
dee" you should probably say "gal dee" in
return. So "gal dee." Better.
 I know even less
about Dothraki culture but I do know
that you really really really don't want
to get a Dothraki mad, so if someone
tells you, greets you with "math" you'll
probably want to respond likewise. so "math"
you know I think we don't have quite
enough surliness in the voice there so
try that again
So okay the rest of what I said was in
Esperanto, a language that was invented
in the late 1800s came out some of you
now can recognize that it was invented
in the late 1800s; it's actually a
language I've spoken most of my life
it's a language that next to English I
feel the most comfortable in. The reason
I bring this up is because we're trying
to give some context, some historical
intellectual context what we're talking
about because I know a lot of times when
you talk about invented - when you
mention that word invented languages -
what comes to mind is sweaty sci-fi
geeks who have way too much free time on
their hand and sort of create
languages, but what people don't realize
is that there is a very long and noble
intellectual tradition of creating
languages, so if you go back to the times
of Leibniz for example the great
German philosopher and mathematician, the
guy who invented calculus basically. He
was very much concerned with the idea of
creating a language that would reflect
the reality of the world around us, so if
you think about this for a moment think
about the animals dogs and wolves - you
know from experience, you know from
biology class that dogs and wolves are
very very similar, but think about the
words that we use to express those ideas -
dog, wolf - they have nothing in common
right so the concepts are very closely
related the words could hardly be more
different
now think about our words - dog, God. Well
as Woody Allen first pointed out you
know dog is just God spelled backwards
and there's a lot of truth in that, that
they have the same sounds just ordered
slightly differently, so
our language has these two words being
very similar but presumably - I mean this
depends on your theology - but presumably
the the concepts behind those words are
quite different. Now wouldn't it be
wonderful if the language that we spoke
the words that we used actually
reflected the reality of the word of the
world around us.
Well that's what Leibniz thought and
that's what many of his contemporaries
thought as well and he was so devoted to
that idea that he began to create a kind
of prototype of a language a sketch of a
language that would do exactly that
where things that were similar in the
real world would be similar in the
language as well. Now that language, that
sketch of a language, that he first
created is is no one pays attention to
it anymore
but the basic idea, the thrust of the
idea behind that, is something that still
influences us today. So if you think for
instance about the system that we use of
scientific names for names of plants and
names of animals where you have the you
know things like Homo sapiens where
you've got the genus and the species
names - that really comes out of the times
from Leibniz
and it meets the ideal that Leibniz was
was striving for. If you look at two
animals and see their scientific names
you can tell by looking at the names
whether they are related or not. And in
other more distant ways things like our
periodic table of the elements, dewey
decimal systems, and various forms
of classification actually have their
ultimately their roots in Leibniz and
his contemporaries who were
interested in those sorts of issues. So
let's fast forward now to the late 1800s
when international travel and
communication were rather suddenly
became available to many many people in
a way that just wasn't possible before
in human history. This was because
of expansion of the railroads expansion
or the invention of the use of the
Telegraph the International Postal Union
and the growth of a strong middle class
that was able to afford to travel to
other places at a level that was just
not precedented compared to earlier. So
this was a new experience that masses of
people were having of traveling to other
places and that those new experiences
led to new ways of thinking and
primarily this idea that
people in other countries are really
like us at heart - these are our brothers
and sisters they may have been born
somewhere else they may carry a
different type of passport, but
ultimately they are they are just like
that so this sort of idea that in those
times would have been expressed as you
know "all men are brothers" - this became
very strong in the late the late 1800s
but at a practical level that this was
difficult to implement because people
didn't speak the same language so at
that time dozens of languages were
created and Esperanto was one of them
but there were many others that were
created at that time which were designed
to be easy to learn and that would
somehow help foster this
international understanding. Most of
those languages are long gone and and
forgotten, but that basic idea still
influences us today and so in fact at
the time that idea that people in other
places are more or less like us and we
should try to understand them this is
something that most of us take for
granted - perhaps not as a reality but as
something that we should we should
strive for. At the time it was more of a
sort of radical sometimes even
subversive idea, but it's something that
that we still carry with us and still
consider to be a desirable goal. The
language Esperanto is still
around
people are still attracted to it, people still learn it. The
language itself has kind of taken its
place among languages of the world. If
you look at a number of speakers, it's
somewhere like around around the same as
Icelandic or Latvian or languages like
that - that is, not a huge language but not
endangered either, and there's this
growing phenomenon of Esperanto speaking
households or Esperanto speaking families
where there's you know currently
probably about a thousand
children - native speaking Esperanto
children - and there are even many cases
of families where now where this has
gone on for generations and so we now
have this second or
third or fourth generation of Esperanto
being the language of that family or one
of the languages of that family. So
looking at these languages of the past
whether from the 1600s or the 1800s or
early twentieth century, this can be a
fascinating exercise. But when we do it
we have this tremendous advantage that
were at a distance from them so we can
we can look back, explore and examine the
factors that went into creating these
languages, we can see how they evolved
over time, and we can see how they
continue to influence us today in
sometimes subtle but interesting ways.
With languages like Klingon, Navi,
Dothraki, of course we don't have that
advantage - we're close to them we
don't have that historical distance. But
we do have some other advantages that we
don't have with the older languages -
namely these languages like Klingon, Navi,
Dothraki are languages of our times,
languages that reflect our times and the
people that created them and the first
people that speak them are with us today
and in fact in our case this evening
the people that created the language are
literally with us today,
so we can talk to them and find out from
them their perspective on what these
languages are, what it means, where things
are going and the like. So with that
let's begin.
So Marc Okrand, Paul Frommer, David
Peterson, welcome and welcome to UCSD
welcome back to UCSD. So just for the for
the public what our game plan which the
speakers already know about is we're
going to talk first some about the the
languages themselves what goes into the
sort of nuts and bolts of the languages
we're then going to talk about the
showbiz side of things looking at the
movies and shows and the sort of
production of things and then
we'll talk a bit about the the fans and
the fan base at the end, which we have
some examples in the audience I believe
more than I thought maybe. So to get us
started looking at the language I think
concentrating primarily on this sounds
one of the things that strikes me as
interesting is that on the one hand you
have to make the language seems
sufficiently exotic for some of you this
is a language of another species or at
least people you know living on another
planet you have to make the language
seem sufficiently exotic but on the
other hand it has to be something that
the audience can relate to, so I'm
wondering if that's if there's a sort of
tension between those two that you had
to struggle with or if you had some some
way of addressing those types of
concerns. [Marc:] I wanted to make up a
language this sounded like no other this
sounded like it was not a human language
because that was my instructions. On the
other hand it had to be spoken by real
human actors, so they had to be able
to say all of these things; there wasn't
gonna be any electronic enhancement or
anything like that. I was a little bit
lucky I guess because I did not start
from scratch.
Klingon existed before I got involved
with it.
if you know this Star Trek
movies, the very first movie, the opening
scene is Klingons, and they speak.There's
maybe half a dozen lines commands barked
out and then the ships get zapped
they're gone and the rest of the movie
is what happened to the Klingons, because
they're not in it anymore. But you
see you hear Klingon and there's
subtitles and some of you know this but
for those who don't those words that
language was made up by James Doohan and the
actor who played Scotty. He doesn't say
them; another actor says them, but he made
them up and I didn't know that when I
got involved, I found out afterwards, but
that was the start. So whatever sounds he
had I incorporated, and the basic
syllable structure that he had I
incorporated and expanded from that, but
in expanding from that I had a couple of
things in mind: one was I had to do
what the script said the script said
someone so Klingon character says in his
guttural Klingon - okay the script says
it's guttural, therefore [velar fricative] is going to be prominent in Klingon.
And as I was just saying before I had to have
to make it sound sound weird but still
pronounceable so there's nothing that
there's no sounds in Klingon that you
can't find in some human language
somewhere or other but the collection of
sounds is unique. Llanguages are patterned
things tend to go together; things tend
to not go together, and I violated those
rules and putting picking the sounds for
Klingon because if it violated the human
language tendencies that would make it
sound more anyway at least that was my
thinking.
[Paul:] My experience was somewhat similar to
Marc's. I too did not start from scratch
because it turns out that in thinking
about Na'vi, James Cameron had come up
with about 30 words on his own which
were in the original script. They were
mainly names of characters, names of
places and so on, so I looked at those
and they had kind of a vaguely
Polynesian feel to them so I kind of
took that as a base, but then expanded
out - you talk about exotic of course what
is exotic?
well what's exotic to speakers of
English is not necessarily exotic the
speakers of Thai or Vietnamese or
Amara but I want to add some interest to
the sound of the language so what we
finally decided on - by the way I tried
various things - I came up with at the
very beginning came up with things that
I called sound palates which were
examples of the way the language might
possibly sound, each one had a particular
characteristic, so for example I tried
tone
you speak Chinese know that the same
combination of consonants and vowels in
Chinese depending upon how your voice
goes - if it goes up and goes down - can
mean something totally different so
Chinese  ma ma ma ma, and those are
totally different words. So I
tried that and he didn't like that. I
tried distinctive vowel length so that a, aaa, aaaa
could mean different things. He didn't
like that, but what he did wind up liking
was these sounds called ejections which
sound like oh - they're real human the
real sound who found the real human
languages he found in many Native
American languages they found in Amharic
they found in Central Asia and so on. So
those are some of the sounds that that I
used just like Marc the actors had to be
able to say all of these cells so that
all of the sounds in Na'vi are
pronounceable or I should say are found
in one human language or another but the
combination is unique and the way the
sounds interact is unique, so the
combinations are sounds a consonant
clusters have to be thought about so
those are some of the elements of the
sound system. [David:] So at least with with with
Dothraki and also with high Valyrian, I
started with some material; the
different thing is that it was all
written - so it was George R R Martin
wrote it out.
He wrote it out in a romanization that
he devised and I'm off the cuff and so I
I basically had to analyze how I thought
that he thought
these things were pronounced and also
how the fans of the books would probably
think they were pronounced and I think
that I came pretty close at least to the
latter. It turns out he is huh - I mean
he's from New Jersey but he's got a very
strange way of speaking - so like so what
you know what everybody looks at when
you look at the spelling of Dothraki
everybody pretty much says "ah, Dothraki,
whatever" - he didn't say that he
pronounced it Dothraki - he does that very
very consistently I don't know if you
watching Game of Thrones this season
there's the character Missandei he
also says Missandei, and I don't think I
would have ever predicted that, but
anyway so that's alright, I got close
enough to what the fans were expecting
but so for Dothraki, you know, I kind of
analyzed the sound system there and
filled it out so that it was
naturalistic because that was that was
the goal when you're creating these
things if there are real people you need
to have a language that's going to look
like it's appropriate to them and also
that it evolved throughout history and
so forth but so I kind of stuck with
that I got rid of one of the vowels
because I didn't like it because I don't
like the vowel U , so I figured you know -
 but you know it's not
actually very surprising to have like an
O and U vowel merge at some point in
time so that's just what I had those do.
The vowel system actually this looks
just like Babylonian except where
Babylonian has the U, Dothraki has O so I
figure yeah whatever it's good. Of course
so when I was doing you know the the
other languages like languages for
Defiance where it was pretty much just
me going, and I knew that first of all
the only languages the only sounds that
both languages had have was TH 
because everybody's in love with that
sound. The languages the names the
languages - Dothraki, castithan, irathient
it's like when people are coming up with
these you know made-up names for foreign
cultures they love th they just think
that's the cat's pajamas. But I figured
out a couple of things - one, actors they
get pretty adventurous and they're pretty
good about pronouncing like consonants;
different vowel sounds, those are
kind of lost on them, so I try to keep
the vowels simple and then throw in like
one or two consonants that might be a
little bit tougher or at least putting
them in different positions so like a
post vocalic h which you have in arabic
and lots of languages you don't have in
english something like [Arabic] it's an
Arabic word for Saturday but you know so
it's like you try to make it
naturalistic and then I also try to
throw in something so that it's not
completely just recycling the same set
of sounds and usually can do that with
the phonotactics that is the way that
consonant clusters work the way that
syllables work in the way that all gets
put together. Anyway, they all did a
pretty good job. [Grant:] okay so okay so you've
you've got your sounds, you've got you
know this inventory of sounds for your
your language, but then of course you
have to put them together into words and this part sounds very frightening
to me because you've got I mean
eventually you're gonna have hundreds
and hundreds of words did you have some
system for coming up with them or some
you know muse that sat on your shoulder
and inspired you to -
Maybe go in reverse
order this time
How did you get inspired to create the
actual words? [David:] Well I had a different
method for each language I did so the
way that I like to think of it is I
almost like to think of it when it comes
to lexical generation as far as the the
engine that runs it so it's like I got a
couple different ideas for how this
works and so for like for Dothraki
and Irathient I used kind of this
language engine that i first toyed with
with an earlier language of mine called
Sheeler and then with a Castithan and
high Valyrian I use the same basic
engine that I ran for Komicowi but
what I kind of mean by that is like with
with Dothraki in everything these would be
the easiest to explain you often at
least English is kind of a bad example
for this but Latin may be a better
example but in English you have let's
say if you just have a word like "house"
you have other words that incorporate
word house like "housing," "to house,"
"halfway house," a bunch of other words
with house that I just listed - I mean I
didn't but you know what they are; a
bunch of words have house in them, and so
you see there's like a kind of a common
root and then lexemes kind of get built
out around it. Some languages do this in
much kind of in much greater frequency
something like you'd see in Turkish
and so with both of these languages I
started with roots, and roots tend to
have a very similar pattern so it's like
you know they'll be your CVC root
consonant vowel consonant root; in Irathient there are a lot of roots that
start with two consonants, have a vowel,
end with a consonant, and for each of
those they do it in kind of different
ways that it's like the the ways that
you add affixes to a word will change
ultimately what the word is, so like you
know you
in Irathient let's see one of the
roots is like "pascu" which doesn't
mean anything it's just a root but "spascu"
is somebody who's like a gossip, but
"hapasci" is somebody's like gossip but
that's like really bad, that's like a
somebody who libels or slanders, and then
"tapascu" is libel or slander and
then there's "tipascu" is kind of
like this chatty bird - that was where the
root came from there's a little bird
native bird on their home world.
Anyway so that was that was the origin
of this root. I kind of expanded out to
these other areas, so yeah that's kind of
like how those languages work - I start
with these roots and then build out and
kind of flesh out a little lexical
pattern for whatever that root is and
then the others are kind of different
but you know, too much go. [Paul:] okay yeah I
mean before I began constructing roots I
had to have what linguists call the
phonotactic constraints very well in
place - you know what does a syllable look
like in this language,
what consonant clusters can begin a
syllable, do you have any constant
clusters at the end - the answer is no
only a certain subset of consonants can
occur at the end of cluster, so when that
was clear my mind, the process was
kind of slow and not terribly organized
I like to roll things around in my mouth
when I'm taking a shower for example and
just kind of try various things and what would be a good word for head what would be a
good word for run that sort of thing so
the development of roots was a little
bit slow; it's still kind of slow which
is one of the reasons that maybe I
haven't got the quite as many as many
vocabulary items as as I would like
right now, but the other thing that you
have to think about is what sort of
meaningful elements that are not words
will go into words - so things are dealing
with linguist quote morphemes you know
- what are your nouns is going to look like
Are they going to have endings that
indicate grammatical function? if so, what
kind of cases are they going to be. What
about verbs? Will
be inflected for person and number? is
gonna be tense in the language? gonna be
aspect? whether or not something is
looked at as complete or incomplete, so
all of those things have to be thought
about as well. In a few cases I did what
we might call sort of constructing words
that exhibit iconicity we use that to
indicate - in semiotics actually - a
situation where a symbol, where the form
of this symbol actually reflects
something about what it means - so the
word multisyllabic is in fact multi
syllabic, so it's one of the linguistic
universal, not absolutely, but it's a
tendency that words that indicates
smallness have small vowels, mainly high
vowels like e and i, so the word for
small is hii. Words that indicate
largeness often have big vowels of big
dollars ah where the mouth is open, so in
Na'vi, small is hii and big is sou. So
those are some of the some of the
thought processes that went into
instructing the words. [Grant:] Interesting yeah. Marc, do you have.. [Marc:] I did it the other way
around.  The word for big is "tim"
because it's "i" [Paul:] as in English.
[David:] it's kind of like big and small in
English [Marc:] exactly, but there's a bunch of those in
Klingon. What I did is - again starting
with starting with Jimmy Doohan's words -
which I didn't know what they were cause 
he's got a phrase three syllables long
and a subtitle. Is that one word or two
words or three words? I don't know, so
I've made an arbitrary decision three
syllables this particularly
the first syllable is one
word and the next two is the second word
I don't know why, because because you
have to start somewhere. So that sort of
gave me the basic structure of what a
word is. Words can be one syllable, it can
be two syllables for the most part. Then
I have my certain sounds and did the
same thing what could a syllable be and
what I ended up doing initially after
making the decisions about
are there gonna be prefixes and suffixes
and all that sort of thing is I made a
big chart of all the possible syllables
crossing out the ones that sounded like
certain English words that I knew could
never be in a movie or on TV. And then I
was making up the vocabulary just eeny
meeny miny you! and so on and so
on until until thought that's why did
initially its time went on I started and
the language started taking form that I
started thinking about it a little
differently because it wasn't quite so
arbitrary this is a word that's in the
family of words with something or
there's so maybe there should be some
kind of connection or something like
that, and over time because I did this at
first a teeny bit but then I got - I don't
know mean or something, and I would say
that now - I don't know - a third to a half
of the Klingon words are really
bad puns. [Grant:] okay well actually this brings
me to the next question I was gonna ask
about whether there were any like inside
jokes in terms of you know that
the audience wouldn't necessarily get
you know or someone just hearing the
language wouldn't get but that you know
that you know the word for beer is your
favorite beer spelled backwards or something. [Marc:] the word for beer is "hic"
It sounds like earlier you mentioned something that for a linguist
might be a kind of inside joke if the if
the word for if the word for large has
the vowel that's usually used
for small and vice versa so you know
[David:] when I was applying because
the way that I came at
least the first job sure for Dothraki
for Game of Thrones you know 
we were with a whole whole cohort of
language creators some of whom were
quite famous within the community
like Sonia Ellen Keitha and John Quijote
for example and so when we got to the
second round the final round and they
were finally four of us left - John Quijote,
Bill Weldon, and Simone
Olivier - we decided to you know
whoever of us won, we
should have some Easter eggs for each
other in the language, so and
John came up with you know
some gloriously crude examples, so
we kind of went with that, so
John's language ithcuela it's in
in Dothraki it means
it means like "breakable, brittle" - you
know because his language is so famous
for being you know expansive and huge.
[laughs] John's a good friend.
and then let's see
Oh Bill's was "vil" because
there's no V&V have merged in Dothraki -
his is "to manage to," because like he
managed to make it to the second round.
And let's see what Simone - oh,
I felt kinder to him so he's just a
"general male relation"
And then of course my wife in
the audience was a couple of words
one of which actually made it in, and I was
so excited because like I often they
they would give me these lines that
would come up after the scripts were
already translated to say okay you do
this line and they they just pull these
random ones out of there so like one of
them was like why don't - one of the
actresses up there in the fellow whose
head you saw on screen there - they are
having a conversation where the the one
says you know "why don't you go get these
foods" and one of them was "why don't
you get some - it was like rabbit or duck,
I think it was and of course you know
"duck" is my name for my wife and so the
word for deck is Allegra which is her
middle name
she's somewhere - Aaron where are you? -
she's got a bunch of words in all my
languages. She's not gonna raise her hand
now 'cause then everybody will look at
her [Grant:]  that's somehow now makes
that seem with the severed head seem
much more romantic [David:] poor guy he was great
I loved him
[Paul:] Na'vi has a few such terms - not very
many - they're mostly ways that I wanted
to honor people who I particularly
admired who are important to me so
sometimes I would take a name and spell
it backwards if it fit into the Na'vi
sound system sometimes I would take a
name and sort of filter it through the
Na'vi sound system; there aren't more
than about maybe three or four of those
but what I have been thinking since the
vocabulary is still being developed is
sort of going in the other direction -
like for example we don't have a word
for disgusting, you know. If there's some
what I particularly don't like, maybe I
could do something like that.
[David:] there's a word in there that has to do
with impotence whose name is some sort
of Associate Producer yeah yeah I'm
gonna say which it wasn't Dave and Dan
those guys are awesome
[Marc:] you're much much kinder than
alright I think of lots of kinda so it's
odd for a Klingon to be kind because if
I came up with a word for something bad
okay and then sounded like somebody's
name, not necessarily somebody that I
knew, but a name I said no, that's not
fair that that poor person will be
associated forever with that bad meaning
so I wouldn't do that. [Grant:] okay I'm beginning
to be happy that my name has many
English specific consonant clusters
so it doesn't show in in your languages. So of course as a linguist we could go on and on about the
various structural questions but let me
just ask one more type of question that
I think is interesting is that none of
the languages, at least the three
languages that are that were mainly
looking at here - none of them is is
particularly simple in its structure, so
they all have at the very least a
complex case or agreement system or both, and you know so when I think about it I
think well why - you know they're not
gonna know the difference - why why didn't
you just take the path of least
resistance and just you know whip out a
language with that had no inflectional
morphology that you just put the
words together and it would be it would
be fine. You could have gotten the job
done much faster and wouldn't have it
just seems a lot easier, but none of
you - at least on these languages - none of
you took that that route. So Marc, maybe
you were the pathbreaker [Marc:] because I wanted to have a good time while I was doing it. It's been much more interesting
to make up something that has a little
bit of complexity because you get you
get to figure out these systems and you
know trick yourself into thinking you
know what you're talking about and and
things like that so I did it
you know frankly for me as much as
anyone else and also I did it I did it
for other linguists - okay I didn't
realize that when I started like what I
was into it I was realized I really know
linguists will get this nobody else will
but it still sounds okay so I'll keep it.
But it was to make
it more fun and also more real.
I mean the point of doing this stuff in
the first place was to make the
movies seem more real; that's weird for
Klingons to be real but anyway but it was to add
some reality to it so in the same way
that in Star Trek in particular but
other things too paid a lot of attention
to science so it's a hard science to
astrophysics or whatever it is
incorporated that stuff and then
expanded from that and made some stuff
up, because it takes place in the future
the language, you know, I thought and
they thought should sort of be the same
thing. It should be based on the way
languages really really work so that
it'll sound real and work like a
real language it doesn't fit in with the
culture and all that sort of thing. [Paul:] I had quite a few similar
considerations I wanted it to be fun for
me I also had a sense kind of a
premonition in a way that that people -
not necessarily linguists - but people
would be looking at the language and
examining it with a fine-tooth comb, so I
wanted to make it interesting for people.
I also wanted to push the envelope a
little bit - I mean this is a language
spoken on a moon going around a gas
giant in the Alpha Centauri star system.
It shouldn't be too close to a human
language and yet still have human
characteristics, so I wanted to see kind
of how far I could go with certain
things that human languages do, so for
example the verbs have a fairly complex
tense and s spectral system that's all
done through infixes - through taking a
root and shoving something in the
middle of a root - now you find that in
human language, but not as extensively as
in Na'vi. I should add that when I
created Barsoomian for John Carter it
was a very very different situation
because there's a line in the first book
on which the movie is based where the
narrator is saying the language of Mars
is so simple that I was able to master
it in a week and I could understand
everything that was said to me and
express all my thoughts. Now no language
has ever been that simple, but I said to myself, okay well
this gives me license to create the
simplest possible language so I did, so
there was a very different kind of
experience. [David:] no seriously though that
would be incredible. Can you imagine if there was a language like that?  A week?
Yeah so you know, when I was hired for a Game of
Thrones I was coming through a long
process where the job was advertised
amongst the language creation community
out of which I came. I started creating
languages in 2000. Game of Thrones
came along in 2009, and I came out of a
tradition - you know basically the the
artistic language tradition - there are
basically three types of languages -
engineered languages, auxilary languages
like Esperanto, and then artistic
languages - which at least online have
taken the form mostly of the
naturalistic language, a language that
looks as if it could exist somewhere on
earth, and so more than anything else
especially since I was the one basically
the first one ever to created languages
who was hired to create a language, I
wanted to honor this tradition and honor
the community that I came from. I knew
that I was going to be looked at a lot
mainly from the people within the
language creation community and what I
was creating was going to be judged.
They knew my previous work, but I wanted
to do something better, and so yeah that was why I really employed
the the historical approach, starting
with a proto language and evolving a
language up to a point,
and I did that with with all of them
like you know I've done alien languages
for Defiance but honestly when it comes
to alien languages or languages for
aliens, I look at the aliens first and
ask just how different from humans are
they, and it's like you know they look
different, and they might have some
different facial structure, but basically
they're not different enough from humans
to warrant a language that's too
different from a naturalistic human
language, or at least you know kind of
like the aliens of defiance
they still you know have offspring, care
for their offspring, you know want to
ensure that the offspring lives to
maturity, and they form themselves into
communities, and so you know language
is basically a social phenomenon, and the
way that they socialize
is not too dissimilar from the way that
human groups
are dissimilar from one another, and so I
figured it should be probably as it as
similar as human languages are from each
other
and as you know that can be quite
dissimilar if you've ever looked at any
Australian languages, you'll know it's
pretty it's pretty darn dissimilar. I
often think that they're just making
that up, those Austrialians, they are wonderful, but so
but really though as kind of like you
know I was going to be the kind of the
the flagship member or the banner carrier for the language creation
community and I wanted to show that
especially since the early 90s when
we've been able to communicate and share
with each other and learn from each
other that we've learned a lot we've
been getting better at this
and that we hope to continue to get
better. [Grant:] okay so let's move on to the
aspect of the production of the more
showbiz side of things and I think one
thing that intrigues a lot of people
myself included is how the language gets
from you - the people who create the
language and then translate the lines
that are needed - how it gets from you to
the actors. So David I know I've seen
programs on TV where they've shown you
recording lines, but how did -
Did any of you work directly with actors or
how did that happen?
[David:] We could start over with people that did
[Marc:] yeah yeah but I did the general
procedure was well when I first did it
with Klingon I did Vulcan before I did
Klingon but that was a whole different
process. For Klingon what I did is I
wrote it all out - I had to figure out
a transcription system, since I was
going to give them a little script, and
for those sounds that were the same as
English, you know A as in father, that
kind of thing, that was that was fine. For
the sounds that we're not in English, how
am I going to write them? and I could not
assume that all of the actors would
understand the international phonetic
alphabet or something like that,
although some did, so I made up an
arbitrary system and I used capital
letters to mean this is not what it
normally is in English it's something
special
here's what it is. So the capital H is [velar fricative]; the capital Q is - that's different from
I use a capital I so it'll always
pronounce "i" never pronounce "eee" just as a
reminder kind of thing and so on. So I
wrote all those things out and
then I made recordings then on
cassette tape and sent them to
paramount. Paramount reproduced these
tapes and gave it to the actors and they
put it in a cassette players in their
cars drove down the Hollywood Freeway
spitting at their window and learn their
lines and then I was out on the set so
most of the time in the first couple of
movies, actually the first three movies are
first three movies were Klingon speak
that I was involved which
h is if you know this
numerology you know it's three, five and
six - most of the time when there's when
they're speaking Klingon I'm just off
camera because we've been running the
lines and running the lines and other
lines just before. Some of the actors
took to it right away
picked it up very very quickly. Some of them, we have to work at it and work at it
work it and then they would finally get
it. When you make a movie, as you
know when you when you shoot something,
as soon as that scene is over the
director yells cut and then the director
will check with the sound person and the
camera person  - "did it look okay?  did
it sound okay? did a truck drive by in
the middle? was someone off mic?" you know, that sort of thing, and if it wasn't okay
alright we'll do it again they do it
again for other reasons too we'll do it
again. So they always would ask me you
know, "Did the Klingon sound okay?" and I
learned early on to say "yes."
because time is money and all that stuff, but they weren't they were checking
all the time. They wanted to make
sure it was okay and if the actors said
the line in a way that didn't sound like
Klingon - and there was enough sense of
what Klingon sounds like even in the early days that you know
they would do it again there's one scene
in Star Trek 3 where the the Klingon
heavies commander Krug refers he tells
 his gunner to shoot at
another ship and just hit the engine now
don't blow the thing up, just to hit the
engine so he says the phrase "engine only"
which is "jum top nech"
so just the engine and when the actor  playing the
role has Christopher Lloyd before Back
to the Future
he said "blah blah blah jon ta nee" and the
director, who is Mr. Spock said
"no no he's supposed to be talking
Klingon, not French" you know
do it again, but if it did sound like
Klingon, even if it was the wrong thing,
we'd let it go and make a note - all
right, he said "toe" he was supposed to say
"too" - its "toe" from now on.
[Grant:] but so even the people on the production side developed
a sense of what Klingon sounds like. [Marc:]  yeah
[Paul:] again my experiences were so much similar. I developed what I thought was a very
transparent orthography - spelling system -
for Na'vi - for example for the
ejectives - [ejective]  was KX and [ejective] was T and so on, but I found that the actors really
needed something in addition to that, so
I came up with sort of a quasi pseudo
phonetic English transcription so
in addition to the actual Na'vi
spelling, I would transcribe it where the sound
was "u" written OO and the sound "i" was written EE
and that that seemed to help. I had
the opportunity to sit down with the
seven actors who use the language to any
extent in the movie, typically a couple
of weeks before a particular scene was
going to be shot to go over the
pronunciation with them I also did the
tapes so to speak, actually MP3s
and someone advised me to Berlitz
the tape so in other words rather than
giving them the complete sentence I
would give them parts of the sentence
and then allow room for them to repeat a
pause for them to repeat and then put
the parts together into larger parts and
so on until they finally got got this if
you think about it they had a really
hard time you know no one has ever heard
this stuff there's crazy sounding stuff
they have to memorize it because there's
no cue cards you know when you're doing
all this stuff you can't do looking at
cue cards, so you have to memorize it they
have to make it sound as if their own
as if it's their own language, and they
have to act and and all of that was was
really quite challenging. They all really
wanted to master it, they really wanted
to rise to the occasion and I think in
general they they did a very good job. I
was on set for the shooting of
virtually all the scenes that involved
the language to any extent. As you
know typically it's not just one take
per scene - it's maybe seven or eight or
nine takes per scene, and as you might
expect the language varies, the accuracy
of the language vary from take to take
I was there on set and between
takes three and four for example I might
walk up to a particular actor and say
you know the Na'vi was really
good but just make sure that this vowel
is not "a" but "aa" .  Sometimes the actors
were very receptive to that; sometimes
when they saw me coming, they would
quickly run in the other direction, 'cause they didn't want to do it. So I had to be a
diplomat you had to know when it was
appropriate to do that and when is
appropriate to say you know I think I'm
gonna let it go, but the when I heard the
final results, in general I was I was
pretty pleased
Every so often I would hear something
which I hadn't intended and which had
come out - because if you think about it
you know which take of those nine takes
is James Cameron gonna gonna choose?well, I would like him to choose of course to
take with the actor really nailed the
language perfectly, but that's not
reality. Reality is he has a lot of
things to think about and it's not
necessarily gonna be the best in terms
of language which is going to appear in
the final film. So if I heard something
that wasn't quite what I intended, the
first question was does this fit into
Na'vi phonology and fortunately most
the time it did, so then I said okay well
what could it possibly mean could it fit
into the grammar, and so I'm not going to
give you the specific example but it
turns out this is a rather important
word
Na'vi which was coined by one of the
actors and the actor has no idea.
[David:] yeah so from the other end of the
spectrum, I still haven't been on set for
Game of Thrones. The only actors
I've ever talked to her the actors whose
characters are dead.  I've talked to
Jason Momoa now, but it was after season
two was done filming. Actually for the
first time ever, this is kind of a
momentous for me - at this at the season 3
premiere party I talked with one of the
actors whose character survives this
season, like "wow."  Whereas for Defiance it's
awesome. I talked to all the actors
beforehand I've been on set several
times and I experienced exactly the
things that the same thing as Paul
just described, which I didn't anticipate
beforehand which is that you know yeah
like there was some one actor in the
pilot, and I was there for this filming
of the scene he was having absolutely no
trouble with a really long line,
pronouncing it exactly the same way every
single time and it was perfect and then
there was another really short line, and
he was just constantly screwing it up,
and so I was like trying to help him,
work with them, and he got better and
better and better, and finally he was
just nailing it, but of course when it
finally got printed, they chose one of
the takes where he was not getting it
and it's like at that point it's like I
felt bad for him it's like he worked so
hard and he finally did get it but you
know at the same time it's like the
actors come to really know the language
and really like have it in their heads
and I really know language and work with
it and the writers get it to a certain
extent, but the directors and editors - I
mean not so much you know. so anyway
[Grant:] alright well let's talk a little
bit about the fans and this is probably
the more dangerous part of the talk for
me at least, so I want to tread carefully
here, but I'm wondering what you
think about the fact that there are fans
not just of the programs of course
 the movies, but of the languages?
So you created these languages
for a very specific purpose, and now
there are people who are investing major
amounts of time
learning or than developing these
languages. Does that make you happy, sad,
guilty, mixed feelings? I'm curious. [Paul:] it first of all it makes me surprised yeah but but
but more than that it brings me
tremendous joy it's just such an honor
to know that there are people out there
who are really devoting this incredible
amount of time and energy to learn this
language that I developed and I must say
at this point there are people who
actually use it better than I do
who actually speak it and write it with
more grace and more creativity and the
reason is that they're using it every
day; it's become a medium of genuine
communication all over the world. I mean
I'm not gonna tell you we have tens of
thousands of speakers but we have a core
community that is writing poetry and
writing haiku and writing prose, we have
we have we have not me contests every
year, I mean it's become quite
extraordinary, and not only that: one of
the unexpected joys is that a community
has developed and I've made friends for
life. So I mean I never thought that
I would have that benefit and it's just
been been a joy. [David:] well, I'm really
really really grateful to all nine of my
fans
you think I'm kidding - at least for Dothraki I think
there's nine but we may have lost a
couple. But I wasn't actually surprised
by that result. I kind of knew beforehand
that there was I mean you know Dothraki
is I think really really popular amongst
reporters and also really really really
popular amongst writers of NBC's
comedies - the Thursday night comedies, but outside of that I'd say there's
really probably exactly nine people who are really
interested in learning it and and kind
of using it and I met two of them
they're very very very nice; one of them
Clarissa turned me on this movie Captain
Blood with Olivia de Havilland - oh man
yeah that was incredible but
but you know like even when this was
announced back in April of 2010 they say
you know HBO's Game of Thrones going to
have you know to the Dothraki language
even on the forums for fans of
the book series like the first thing was
like "wow, that's that's cool that they're
doing that, so are they gonna do the high
Valyrian language?" and I was like
everyone's like "yeah we want to hear
that language" but eventually I did get
to do that, so you know it's good, but
really I mean who the the people that
have looked at it at all or a better you
know positive about it it's like you
know what what more could you ask for
it's just so nice and people in general
in general have been really very nice
and that's cool.
[Marc:] I was surprised when it first
happened I mean when we were working on
on Star Trek 3 which is the first one
with any extensive amount of Klingon in
it, various members of the crew meaning
the moviemaking crew not the Enterprise
crew would come up to
and say "oh you're the language guy, it
sounds like Arabic, it sounds like Russian"
they all said different things, I think that was good that was good
and then they say "how do you say...?" you
know "how do you say" and the most common
thing they would ask me, since you
brought it up at the beginning yourself
is I would say they say "Say something in
Klingon" I say "what do you want me to say?"
they say "say how are you" and I say "Oh a Klingon would never
say that" they go hahaha and they would
go away, but I got tired so that's where
this "nook nek" thing comes from and
what it means is "what do you want?"
[Grant:] so I wondered and I wondered in fact if what I had people do at the beginning
was actually authentic but i but it
because probably what our mini
conversation really was was like "what do
you want?"
and then response "what do YOU want?"
[Paul:] I have a question for mine for my
colleagues here: have you it have you had
people ask you how to say something
because they wanted to have a tattoo? and
I you know I feel kind of funny about
I'm a little bit reluctant to answer I
will say "look here's how to say it, but
think about this okay?
you know, fifty years from now, are you
absolutely certain that you want a Na'vi
sentence tattooed it on your whatever."
[David:] personally I think it's incredible - like I would never ever get a tattoo myself
but the fact that somebody would
permanently indelibly you know for the
most part ink something on their body
it's like wow, so like you know with Game
Thrones, it's cool, but the most recent
thing is that you know for the Defiance
I was able to develop some writing systems, which is actually
the thing I like to do most ,when it
comes to language creation, and then
there was somebody for the first time
asked "can I get my name in the castithan
writing system?" and I was like completely
blown away, and I was like "yes absolutely
I am so happy that you're doing this" and
it's like okay now I just need to make
sure I don't say anything that puts her
off it, but she got it and so now it says
Laura on on her wrists but then like
what was even what do you even went even
further than that was a couple weeks ago
somebody asked me how to write something
in Komikowi which is one of the
languages that I created on my own and
and I showed them and they got a tattoo
of this and in the writing system which
is like a kind of like a hieroglyphic
writing system I was like wow that's
just about the coolest thing ever, it's
like I would never do that but that is
the coolest thing, and you are my friend
for life I love you.
[Marc:] I don't know if anyone's ever asked for tattoos. I know people who've gotten
tattoos in Klingon and the Klingon
writing system, which I did not create or
yeah I really don't know much about why
I know how it works because it doesn't
work, because the writing you've
seen up until now anyway on the TV shows
and in the movies is artwork and there's
been no attempt made to match the
artwork to the spoken language and people who do that are very
careful that the Klingon writing in one
on one control panel you know is a
different jumbled up set of characters
from the Klingon writing in another
control panel because they do they
control different things and the Klingon
writing book on the door is the same
because it means exit or what have you
so I've had people say I want to put the
tattoo on and Klingon writing question
the Klingon speaking
community has adapted those characters
in several different ways, so this is
this is an A, this is a B and so on and so
far is it and they can read it it's so
far anyway that and then what you see in
the films it's not quite a match [Grant:] okay
well actually with what you said you
just surpassed what I was expecting for
the answer to my another question I was
thinking of asking which was what the
most like diehard fans what the most
impressive things they've done. [Marc:] I'll tell you what you won't I tell you in my case
what it is. There's a website out there with a list
of all the mistakes I've ever made
[David:] god I really hope they don't do that for me
[Grant:]so I thought maybe there was gonna be
you know someone who gets pulled over
for a traffic ticket and refuses to
speak to the officer and anything but
Dothraki, but getting a
tattoo, that that goes pretty far. So
we're going to move into a segment now
where you can ask questions and I'm sure
much...
[Eric:] as you feel so inspired to ask your
questions; we don't have too much time
and I anticipate that there will be a
lot of people wanting to ask questions
so try to keep your question brief and
if possible address it to one particular
panelist so that we don't so that
everybody gets a chance to ask our
question and we'll alternate between the
two microphones and just arbitrarily
I'll start on the left. [Audience:]  okay well my
question was for all of you, so sorry.
What did you guys all study in grad
school? I mean did it prepare you or is
something relatively unrelated to you
know conlanging.  [Marc:] Well, linguistics, but more particularly what I focused on
was American Indian languages,
mostly those in California mostly those
around the San Francisco Bay Area, all of
which were not spoken that by the time I
got to them, so it was all dealing with
manuscripts and things like that, and
that prepared me for Klingon because
when I was working on it initially I
hadn't heard it. [Paul:] so you know I was a
graduate student in linguistics and I
would say that my courses prepared me
pretty well and also my experience with
languages, because there's nothing like
actually trying to learn languages
yourself to give you a clue as to what's
what might be involved in constructing
[Marc:] and then I was a graduate school here in linguistics yeah
is one of my professors right here and
I TA'd for this fellow. [Eric:] I taught him everything he knows
[Marc:] yeah for me my linguistics and conlang career were intertwined and
inextricably. I created my first language
during my first linguistics class and so
they've been going hand-in-hand ever
since, but there have been a couple of
really key moments that that changed
things for me, for example learning about
optimality theory from Eric Bakovic,
for example, there's nothing better for
designing tent systems or tone systems
than then using OT and then the
stuff that I learned about from
morphology from Farell Ackerman whose
class was so good I took it twice
completely changed the way that I create
and look at language, like for example I
no longer use morphemes as a theoretical
construct, because I think they're bad.
[Audience:] this is a question for the creator of Klingon. Given that as the creator I
suppose your initial creation was more
or less the Queen's Klingon or BBC
Klingon; as Klingon has been learned and
used by its its fans have you seen any
regional dialects of Klingon like
British versus America?
[Marc:] in terms of grammar and
vocabulary, no, because they won't do
anything unless I say it's okay; I've
been accused of being a dictator when it
comes to Klingon; that's not a decision or an appointment I made of myself; the Klingon
speaking community decided that's where
they wanted to do it. In terms of
pronunciation on the other hand I was at
a meeting of Klingon speakers a few
years ago and this guy came in whom no
one had ever seen before; all these
people know each other pretty well.
Someone came to no one ever seen before
started speaking Klingon really well -
with an Australian accent. Everyone knew
who he was, because they dealt with him
online before. They'd never met him
but they knew because this could be
Australian Klingon that's so and so, I know
that's and we got an argument once there
was a one time we had a international
convention of Klingon speakers; it was in
Brussels, and the German Klingons and the
American Klingons got in a big argument
about how to pronounce "ch" and it's all
my fault because in the book I say the
sound because we don't have that in
English I was trying to explain to
English speakers in writing what that's
like, so I said among other things, that's
like the sound at the end of the
composer name Bach - well that's the way
Americans pronounce that composer name
if you're German, it's Bach, it's softer and
so the German said no it's a kind of
sound
[Eric:] let's go over to the other side here. [Audience:] hi
I work with the reconstructed systems of
Greek and Latin, ancient Greek and
ancient Latin, and I find them very thick
I'm interesting the phenomenon of the
thinness of the languages where someone
could say yeah I made up three or four
languages already in my life and I've
got thousands of people speaking them
now; at what point do you come upon the
thinness of your language you realize
you know this is something that that's
made up, this doesn't have the cultural
resonance that Greek or Latin would have
it's kind of a mean question but maybe
yeah maybe you can speak to it.
[Marc:] well,  I'll say this first of all: when
you create languages using the
naturalistic approach, you start from the
proto language, so something like
proto-indo-european and then you evolve
it throughout history; now like for
something like George RR Martin's Game
of Thrones, it can be tied to culture
insofar as he has created the culture
for Dothraki, so for example he hasn't
said anything about how they measured
the passage of time with regard to
months or weeks or fortnights or
whatever, and so that area of the
Dothraki vocabulary must remain blank,
until he provides an answer to that
question, but to that extent, first of all
it's it actually is not difficult to
create a full grammar; it can be done. You
can actually have a fully fleshed out
grammar complete with the regularities
and and cultural tidbits; the problem
comes in fleshing out the lexicon, which
takes a long long time, pretty much as
long as you want to work on it, yeah
Dothraki has about 3500 words but you
should have about eight to ten thousand
if you want somebody to be able to speak
like a second language learner, of course
you know language like English is
claimed to have a million, but like a
high school graduate has about fifty
thousand right, and then as you
specialize you get even more than that
it's something that even if you try
to automate the process to do it
authentically takes a very long time and
you know, you just have to do the best
that you possibly can.
that's what we tried to do.
[Marc:] yeah, actually, I dealt with exactly that when I was
writing the Klingon dictionary because
since these guys guys were interested in
the language I thought maybe fans would
be too so I got the idea of writing this
book and I wrote a partly a grammatical
description then partly got a lexicon of
a list of words and if I put the words
in the dictionary that were in the
movie and nothing else it would've been
a really skinny book and so it wasn't
that much really in the movie so I had
to expand the vocabulary and deciding
how to expand the vocabulary was much
harder than describing the grammar or
something like that because I didn't
gonna make words I guess that's not
going to be everything so I made an
arbitrary decision which sounds weird
but this context maybe not so weird. I
said I'm not gonna make I said to myself
I'm not gonna make up any words other
than the ones that were already made up
for the movie that had anything to do
with Klingon culture or Klingon
geography, which sounds weird, but I'm not
a story writer, I'm not a screenwriter,
okay in the same way in your case come
up with it first yeah it was the same
thing I'll wait for them to put it in
some movie or some episode or some then
I'll tell them what it's called, but not
the other way I've changed my mind about
that by the way. I have a different
approach. [Paul:] I mean it's it's clear that
every language exists in a cultural
context and in and to an extent it has
to reflect the environment it exists in
and the culture of its speakers.
There are certain clues as to what the
culture is like of the Na'vi on Pandora;
one of course is a movie there are
peripheral materials that have been
published by Fox which presumably have
the blessing of James Cameron but there
are other areas that are still mysteries
as you said and so we've come up with is
a term Cameroonian and there
are certain things where if
I were to begin developing vocabulary
for that particular area I would be
infringing on an area that really
doesn't belong to me so there are
certain things that are going to have to
wait in terms of developing vocabulary
until James Cameron tells us
what they're like. [Audience:] so you guys actually sort of just answered mine but I was
gonna ask how the culture of the race or
people that you're developing a language
for affects your process and I guess you
all sort of address that but if you have
any other...[Paul:] I mean its its
culture its physiology for example so
one example I like to give is it when I
was looking at these sketches for the
Na'vi I realized that they have four
fingers on each hand and not five, okay
so that said to me Wow probably they
don't have a decimal system of
numeration probably they have an optical
system and so I mentioned to Jim, I
said what do you think base-8 he said
absolutely go with it and so the Navi
counting system is base eight so you
count [counting in Na'vi]
one to eight and then nine is
what I which is eight and one and ten is
8 into and so on, so that's part of it; just
in terms of the richness of the language
and the expressions that are used in the
language, every language has its own set
of Proverbs, for example, that reflect
what life is like reflect the
environment so in Na'vi we have a proverb
it means "the tail
and ears also speak," oka,y and if you if
you watch the you Na'vi in the movie
you realize that your tails and ears are
very expressive and that body language
is very important to communication so
those are that's also part of of the
richness of language in a cultural
context okay let's move back over here
[Audience:] so for this is a question for all of you. What upcoming projects are
you guys working on?
and if you could tell us which TV show or movie or anything else
because let's do a little spoiler here. [David:] well, I worked I did the
language for a pilot for the CW but I
can't tell you what its name is because
they said that the name might be
changing so and I also I also worked in
the language last year for a movie
coming out this year that I can't tell
you about. [Paul:] I can tell you very
definitely what I will be working on I
can't tell you when Avatar 2 & 3 have
been announced. yeah! As far as we know
James Cameron is working on the scripts
in New Zealand even as we speak but we
don't know the exact timeframe but I
think it's going to be soon it has been
announced that 2 & 3 will be shot
together and cut into two different
movies so I'm waiting by the phone to
hear "ok you're gonna get it script in
the mail" tomorrow so we'll see. [Marc:] so I'm not working on anything new right now
however, just finished very recently
working on something that I can't tell
you what it is, but one month from now
you'll know. [Audience:] I have another Hollywood
question. What about translations of the
movies or shows and such into other
human languages? Did your languages get
translated, did the subtitles get
translated? [Marc:] okay I'll tell you
what my experience with that. I saw it
was probably at a Star Trek convention
to some place a version I'm gonna mess
this up I'm sure if I gotta try to
remember how this work it was a it was a
French version of Star Trek 2 and Star
Trek 2 is all in English except for one
little scene that's in Vulcan and has
English subtitles in the english version
English subtitles and the French version
was subtitled in French every time they
spoke English but when they spoke Vulcan
they left the subtitles in English for
the French people who didn't understand
English to understand the Vulcan
[David:] you know one thing that I was very
surprised by is that Game of Thrones is
dubbed a lot of places like I don't
understand why they would do that like I
just you know we don't like dubbed
things we like subtitled things but yeah
they actually do dub it and they had to
come up with pronunciation guides for
like Dothraki for all of the other
international dubbing you know actors
and I've never heard any of it I'd like
to because I've heard some strange
stories but I just for fun though I have
come across subtitles from other like
sites from a lot of Russian sites like I
had a lot of fun coming up with how you
would might do it not a romanization but
a Cyrrilalization of how you might write
Dothraki with Cyrillic characters that
actually generated a lot of interest
from Eastern Europeans they're like now
you shouldn't use that and then I did
one for Arabic as well that was more
familiar to me
[Paul] Avatar is probably played in every every country in the
world so it has been dubbed into a lot
of languages so the question is what do
you do with the Na'vi - of the seven
characters - one, Atukan, speaks only Navi
and so there's no problem you simply use
that voice track and there's no problem
but with the other six characters you
can't do that
the reason is that Natheri for example
speaks both English and nothing so we
can't have her sounding with one voice
in one language and another voice and
the other language and so what I had to
do was simply create the sound files and
tell the people in charge send them off
and hopefully this will be a guide for
the people who owe speaker and I have
not listened to the results but I'm sure
they're very very good. [Audience] umm this question is just for the creator of Dothraki
you had mentioned creating an orthography to go with your language. I was
wondering in what sense is Dothraki
phonetic related to its writing system
is it strictly a one-to-one sound to
symbol system or did you imagine a store
component to it? [David:] okay wait let me yeah let me clarify some terminology there so
I created a romanization system that is
computer one-to-one because I think
that's the most useful. Dothraki
themselves they're said in the books to
be illiterate they don't ever written
form in their language so I haven't I
haven't touched that I just figured you
know just use the romanization system
some people some fans have come up with orthographies for them but you know it's
non-canon. For the Defiance languages I
have done written systems and both
systems I think are technically abugidas
they're not alphabets and they're
extremely complex one of them is really
really regular it's it's worse than
English but not as bad as Tibetan so but
yeah the the writing systems themselves
are also evolved and there's there's
actually a really good amount of
literature that's done on the evolution
of orthography I recommend "Writing systems"
from the Oxford series that the red the
red cover one it's really really neat
you can see there's like a postcard out
there if you want to see what they look
like you can see him please take those
away I don't want to have any left.
[Audience:] this question is for the creators of Na'vi and Klingon; the Klingons are a
technological species, they've conquered
their neighbors; the Navi are not
technologically advanced ; they're
susceptible to being conquered or have a
human culture and pressed upon them how
has this informed the creation of your
languages? [Marc:] vocabulary wise is certainly informed it for me because they had to
come up with the words for the
technology. Klingon culture
- actually Star Trek alien cultures in
general are very interesting - because
they're all technologically not all many
of them are technologically very very
advanced but they live in caves.
but the vocabulary had to match
what they're doing through the
technology of stuff there was a
declaration if that's the right word in
the Wikipedia thing about Klingon; it
says in Klingon you can say "bridge" on a
ship but not "bridge" over the water
I've changed that so they had to change
Wikipedia.  [Paul:] so the Na'vi are not a
technological culture and so the problem
comes when you need that kind of
vocabulary in Na'vi - there are a few
places in the movie for example in one
version of the script I'm not sure this
actually made it into the final version
of the film during one of the baths was
seen as the Navi were discussing the sky
people's gunship so they had to use
words, so how do you say gunship? and Navi
are totally non technological culture.
Well there are a number of things you
can do: one thing is to simply borrow the
English word and filter it through the
Navi phonological system so gunship in
Navi is Quinsip; how do you say computer?
if you need to say computer well you
could do the same thing and come up with
something like compotair. I did
something different which is what a lot
of languages do which is sort of use
existing elements create compounds put
them together in a way so that you get
this other concept so computer in Navi
is eltelefono
which means "metal brain" so that's
a way you can sort of get around these
sort of cultural constraints for
technology. [Audience:] the Klingon, Navi, and Dothraki are all proud warrior civilizations how
does that warrior aspect flavor the
creation process for languages compared
to a civilization that was more peaceful
and sort of gentle.
[Paul:] well you have a lot of words for hunting, and for war and for warrior and and for
honor and things like that so those
cultural concepts become vocabulary okay
[Marc:] I agree and it dramatically in anyway there's sort of a subset of the grammar
or something that you use in battle
where you can drop off a lot of prefixes
or suffixes get down to it go [David:] I think
for Dothraki more of the influence was the
fact that they were a nomadic Society so
that they they got that kind of this one
big city but they don't really live
there they don't stay a lot of places so
there there isn't like you know there
isn't like a place suffix that says like
you know I don't know what an equivalent
would be in in English like maybe "ery"
like a bakery yeah, there's there's kind
of nothing like that and yeah of course
plenty of plenty of words for for
hunting and and you know meat.
[audience:] this is a question primarily aimed at the creator of Klingon; so I've run across a story
about a man who tried to teach his son
Klingon his first language, only spoke
and Klingon to his son for like three
years. I'm wondering how you feel about
that?
[Marc:] yeah I just got an email from
that kid in English. The story is the
true story is the the father is a was
when the kid was born and still
is a really really good speaker of
Klingon but when the kid was born he was
a graduate student in linguistics at
Georgetown University in Washington; son
is born and with his wife's approval he
wanted to see - the plan was not to raise
a bilingual kids okay - what he wanted
to see his can Klingon be acquired
as a natural language as opposed to
taught, because everybody who spoke
Klingon up until that point learned it
from somebody who learned it from a book
or learned from tapes or something like
that and you know if you don't if you
grow up monolingual and then take a
Spanish class you're learning a second
language, okay that's fine, but the first
language you speak whatever that is no
one taught that to you no one taught
that to you, it just happens, okay so he
wanted to see if Klingon would just
happen. So he would talk to his son in
Klingon - not all the time he would talk to
an English too -
the mother never talked to the kid in
Klingon, and as is normally the case the
kid learned to I was able to understand
before he was able to talk so the father
would say in Klingon "where is your nose?"
and a kid would do this "where is your
eye?" and the kid would do this he's it
was understanding the first word that
the kid actually said in Klingon is the
word "koch!" which means "stop it! cut it out!"
anyway, time went on the you know the kid
learned some other things, believe it or
not this may come as a surprise when I
was making up the vocabulary for Klingon
I did not make up a word for baby bottle.
It just didn't occur to me that that
would be useful, so there's no word for baby bottle; however there is a word for a
drinking vessel of any kind anything you
drink out of is the same word so it
could be a wineglass or a coffee mug or
a tumbler or anything you drink at it
and that word was used around the house
okay but it was never used specifically
to refer to the kids baby bottle until
one day the father said to the kid go
get me your drinking vessel using
that word and the kid reached for the
baby bottle first thing and it's working
no one told him that that's what that
was called and then once he saw it was
working he kind of gave up on the
project, but my favorite thing my
favorite thing is in a bilingual
situation it's not just the case that
there's two languages floating around
there's also time to use one and times
use the other one it's very intricate
and patterned and not random; it was
triggered by context or who's there or
something or other. Well the kid when he
got to be a certain age started to learn
how to count and he wanted to count
everything and they had stairs in their
house right, so the kids going up the
stairs and he's going "wak, chop, weg"
if the only other person in the room was
his mother, "four, five, six.."
The kid is a sophomore in college; he's
fine.
[Eric:] I should say every linguist who has a
kid thinks about doing that not with
Klingon maybe. I've been giving
I've been given the zero minute warning
which means that I'm going to stipulate
because I'm up here and nobody else is
that we're gonna have two more very
quick questions with two more very quick
answers okay so one from either side
starting over here. [Audience:] so I was wondering
what got you into linguistics and if you
when you were younger just made up a
language?
[Marc:] no, in fact actually I don't
even think even my wife knows this but I
did have a word when I was very very
young it was "somonan" in and I said it
just like that and it just I just say it
when I was feeling good I kind of know
when I was five or six but now I
actually wasn't interested in languages
at all and coming up until like late
high school and then it just kind of hit
me but no the reason I took a
linguistics course and went into
linguistics was because my mother told
me that I should. I wasn't I wasn't gonna
but eventually I gave in. [Paul:] I just loved
languages I mean I start off really
early as a Jewish kid in New York, I was
sent to Hebrew school, and so Hebrew was
my my first foreign language. My folks
both Yiddish at home; they actually spoke
it when they didn't want my brother me
to understand, but still it kind of
kind of fired up something in me, I had
some French and in high school, I had
Latin in the seventh grade, four years of
Latin from from seven, which was amazing
and so it kind of built built from there.
Marc:] yeah I never heard of linguistics until
I got to college and the first I went to
UC Santa Cruz the beginning and everyone
had to take the same course all the
freshmen to take the same course and
this course was called language culture
and society and if you think about it
for half a second there is nothing that
can't be included in that including
business
and I think I don't have never got
this confirmed but I'm absolutely
convinced the faculty put the course
together the day before the students
arrived and there was it was it turned
out to be really good because it was an
introduction to the faculty in an
introduction to the discipline so it's
really fun you know and all these
different things and then you got to
kind of say oh I've never thought about
that before maybe I'm gonna study that a
little bit and the part that grabbed me
the most and all that was was
linguistics, so I took linguistics one
and here I am. I took that same course
several years later and it was called
"Language, sex, and death" that's what we
called it okay so one more quick
question and quick answers please go
ahead [Audience:] I was wondering if you have a favorite word. [David:] I guess my favorite
word is kind of strange it doesn't it
doesn't mean anything interesting but
like in Dothraki if you have to
say need "zigure" and that means
need and don't need is "zigureol" and I
don't know that you can save them really
really fast and so whenever I had to use
it in a translation I was like yeah this
is cool, but it doesn't mean anything
interesting this means need in the
present tense, not in the first person. [Paul:] I have two favorite words; one is
"mayoinoayayah" which I coined before I had a meaning for it because it has a lot of vowels
has vowel clusters so
it turns out that it means "living in
accordance with the balance of life"
which is kind of nice my other favorite
word is "skown" which means "idiot."
[Marc:] all right I'll have two favorite words
too. When I was working on the on the
thing, on the film, I was thinking I
wonder if there's going to be one word
that comes out of this that people are
gonna know and recognize that's Klingon
even if they hadn't seen the film or
don't know how the language works or
something like that and there is - it
turns out I know that's "Qapla!"
see, and I've seen it in all kinds of
things spelled in all kinds of weird
ways but so it's there's that, and the
other one is is the Klingon word for
root beer. I wasn't gonna have a Klingon
word for root beer but one of the
episodes Worf in the Next Generation
drinks some root beer and and says "ah, a
warrior's drink" or something like that
you know going onward for root beer the
way the way Klingon grammar works is you
have two nouns that you wouldn't want to
say both of them so in English we join
them with and A and B okay
you know "cars and trucks" or something
and Klingon you put the end at the end
so be "trucks cars and" alright; the
Klingon word for root beer is "aw je"
the word for "and" in Klingon is "je" ; "aw"
is AW
Eric:] all right so I'm back to my cue cards
here sorry so this concludes our event
this evening please join me in thanking
Marc, Paul, David, and Grant
and believe it or not there's several
other entities and people to thank
thanks also to the linguistics
department the social sciences dean's
office the Department of literature and
the Department of Communication for
their generous sponsorship of the event
tonight a very big thank you is in order
for Robert Kleunder in Granada Yano for
the enormous amount of work that they
put into organizing this event so let's
think
and last but not least thank you all for
coming to our events this has been a
really great turnout for giving us an
opportunity to tell you a little bit
about what linguists do or at least what
some linguists do and stay tuned for
future UCSD linguistic events you can
just go to our website link UCSD
dot edu and you'll find out all about it
or linguistics that UCSD dot edu also
works please get some informational
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on the way in and please consider making
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and enjoy the reception thank you
