Anha Tihak Yera

Little multiconlingual pun there for you. A while back, I was profiled on the CNN show The Next List. When I was prepping for the show, they asked me if I could get some videos of fans speaking Dothraki—about a minute, they said. I don’t think they understood just how long a full minute is, because the videos (supplied by our own Hrakkar and Daenerys) only show up on screen for a few seconds, and they had to do a lot of work to produce (and pronounce!) a full minute of Dothraki dialogue. It was a lot of work (and hopefully fun!), and since you only get to see a very little bit on the show, I thought I’d put both videos up here.

The first is Hrakkar’s video, which is actually a reading of the LCC4 conlang relay text I did for the Fourth Language Creation Conference. The text is called Dorvi Zichome, or “The Disrespectful Goat”, and here it is:

Right on! Dig the lion décor. (By the way, sorry the still image it starts with is a bit pixellated. No idea thy it’s doing that—or why I can’t embed my own darn videos and have to go through Photobucket. Hope you have flash, if you’re reading this… When is HTML5 getting here?!)

(Update: I believe I fixed the image problem. The funny thing [for me] is that I fixed this problem before this post was ever posted, so no one but me ever actually saw the problem. Ha, ha… Anha nemo allayafak…)

Our next video is from Daenerys, who wrote her own script, which must have taken quite a while!

Thanks so much to Dany and Hrakkar! Anha chomak yeri ma anha vemerak ma athhajaraan ma oakahaan yeri!

In other news, I’m going to speaking at the American Mensa Annual Gathering next week. I believe you have to be a Mensa member to attend, but if you are (and you’re going to be in Reno), stop on by!

Recently, I participated in the Conlangery podcast where we discussed Dothraki and growing a lexicon. You can listen to the podcast here. I also did an interview with Saul Gonzalez over at KCRW today. Not sure when it’ll be going up, but when I get word, I’ll let everyone know. Finally, last weekend I gave a conlang workshop at WyrdCon 2012. The convention was a lot of fun, and I got an INCREDIBLE medallion—just for attending! Everyone who attended got one of these (it was the equivalent of a name badge at other conventions). Check it out:

That’s metal—die cut. I honestly wish I was the type of person that wore necklaces and that I had a reason (and the wherewithal) to wear this around. I’m going to do something with it; just not sure what yet.

Oh, but yeah. The whole reason this came up is because I did an interview (or a couple of them) while I was at WyrdCon, and you can read a post about one of them here. (By the way, shout out to Brittany Hanson, who works for the Garden Grove Journal—my local hometown paper! If you go there right now you can read about my old high school’s baseball team winning the CIF championship this year. Go Mariners!)

Also, I recently started a Tumblr account. Not sure where it’ll go, but if you’d like to follow me there, you can do so here.

The Dothraki lexicon and reference grammar document just ticked over to 300 pages yesterday! The language continues to grow, albeit slowly as I’ve gotten bogged down with other work. Until next time, hajas!