UR Humanities Project
0:00 = Mary Ann Mavrinac Introduction
3:03 = Sarah Higley Introduction
6:58 = David Peterson Lecture
54:24 = Q&A
April 13, 2016, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Hawkins-Carlson Room, Rush Rhees Library
University of Rochester
Social media has opened up a once solitary creative pursuit—personal language invention—to other inventors, but David J. Peterson has made it his profession. In addition to creating “Dothraki” and “High Valyrian” for the popular TV series Game of Thrones®, he has designed languages for Defiance, The Shannara Chronicles, The 100, and Emerald City. In his lecture, “New Media Linguistics: Developing Languages for Game of Thrones,” Peterson will provide a rare glimpse into the fascinating process of language creation for fictional purposes, and will review the cultural, historical, linguistic, and aesthetic aspects that are involved in it.
With degrees in linguistics from Berkeley and UC San Diego, Peterson has closely studied the structures of languages world-wide and offers information and advice about creating naturalistic languages as an artform. His 2014 book Living Language Dothraki teaches fans how to speak this nomadic tongue, and in The Art of Language Invention (2015) he offers a rigorous manual of linguistic principles for would-be “conlangers.”
Sponsored by the Humanities Project along with the Neilly Lecture Series, River Campus Libraries, and the Sara Nainzadeh Fund. .
Outstanding! A wonderful event, and so skillfully edited by Will Graver and his team! Thank you, David Peterson and everyone else involved!
On the question of whether speakers of Dothrako or Valeryan would resist change, the conservative tendency of Esperanto speakers suggests that Peterson is right. Zamenhof had no proprietary concerns with Esperanto.
In my conlang in progress, I have a polysyllabic morphology with substantial agglutination, which renders rhyming poetry difficult. I decided that it would probably develop a poetry focusing on alliteration.
He's so good he created the word embarrassable by accident.
7:00
my problem with language creation is that I really want to make a conlang, but I lack inspiration.
Why would anyone want to create such a complicated conlang? Hmmm🤔
Megdevi is a wonderful language
I just watched Peterson's Google talk where he mentions how much he looks up to Sarah and how he wanted to meet her someday, and I'm so happy for him that she introduced him here!
The hardest thing is escaping conventional ideas and rules
American: lets change the name of our language to American
British people: ಠ_ಠ