I was getting real tired of pulling up this blog and seeing a picture of me, so…new post!
Happy New Year!
For those who have been following this blog for a year, you may remember the resolution I made around this time last year. At the time, Dothraki had about 3,300 words, and I said in one calendar year I’d get Dothraki’s vocab up to 5,000 words. Before addressing my progress on that, let me affirm that this was an achievable goal. It really was! When I started Dothraki, I had 1,700 words in about three months. True, I had a lot of time on my hands, but that was three months: This was an entire year! So I maintain that going from 3,300 words to 5,000 words was a more than reasonable goal.
That said, I came nowhere close. Nooooooooowhere close.
By midnight on January 1st, Dothraki had 3,621 words. So given that I was probably underestimating how many words Dothraki had in that post from January 1st, 2012, I’m guessing that means I coined about 300 words of Dothraki in 2012—or about 18% of the words I resolved to coin.
Of course, in the time-honored tradition of American New Year’s resolutions, I’ve got a whole host of excuses to offer for failing to accomplish my New Year’s resolution. For starters, it was a year that ends in a 2, which is always bad luck (it’s true. Google it). Second, if you add up the number of words I coined for all the languages I was working on, I think I made out pretty good!
- Dothraki: 300
- High Valyrian: 585
- Other Game of Thrones Vocab: 340
- Irathient (for Defiance): 1,927
- Castithan (for Defiance): 1,372
- Other Defiance Vocab: 300
- Other Project: 217
And if you total that up, it comes to 5,041. Not too bad! See, I figure if I have more time on my hands, I can focus and really beef up Dothraki’s vocabulary. Unfortunately that’s probably not going to happen any time soon, so I’m going to make a more modest New Year’s resolution. Here it is: I will create more Dothraki vocabulary this year than I did last year. I think I can do it! And if I do, Dothraki will be at 4,000 by year’s end!
In the meantime, my apologies for completely falling flat on my old New Year’s resolution. But look out for this year’s annual haiku competition coming soon!
Firesof sasha lafaya, zhey David
I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself. I read somewhere that the hardest thing to do for conlangers is to come up with new vocabulary. In my limited conlanging experience, you stand head and shoulders above any other conlanger I have had experience with. I really like your idea of using other people’s names as a place to start for new word ideas. Considering how much work goes into the other parts of creating a language, 5,000 words between all your language projects is nothing to sneeze at, at all! In any case, I am looking forward to more Dothraki– and Valyrian– in 2013!
But if I’m not hard on myself, who will be?!
Kirimvose, zhey Hrakkar.
This might not be a popular opinion on a Dothraki blog, but at this point, I’m way more psyched about High Valyrian, the other GoT linguistics (Ghiscari Valyrian?), the Defiance languages, and the tantalizing Yet Another Project you’re working on, than about incremental additions to Dothraki. Don’t get me wrong, I find Dothraki nicely thematic, complex, and original, but it’s sufficiently mature these days to take a step back and leave some limelight to the next generation of langs.
Speaking of which… Yet Another Project? At this rate, you’re going to convince the industry that you’re the only conlanger for hire out there. :\
That was everybody’s opinion when they heard that Dothraki was going to be made into a language.
If Dothraki is as good as it is, High Valyrian is undoubtedly awesome!
I don’t mind that at all, as long as you ask for our (fans’) forgiveness by giving us some HIGH VALYRIAN… PPPPLEASE, zhey David!
It’s cause I’m dying to figure out if the guys from this topic: (http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/49139-high-valyrian/page__st__20) got those guesses right!
Oh, and I might add that I saw a video of the filming (Dany speaking High Valyrian) that leaked (I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help myself) and it sound really cool, congratulations… just… please give us more!
Kirimvose!
Some of that’s right; some of it’s not so right. And stay tuned! I’m sure more info on High Valyrian will be coming out in the coming months.
I’m very confused: back in Season 2, you said that there would be no “High Valyrian” in Season 3 (other than words already in the books). (https://dothraki.com/2012/06/ei-mahrazhith-drivoe/) This changed?
The Indogene and the Liberata have “language sketches”; is there no language as of yet for the Sensoth?
Do the other two out of seven Votan races appear in the first season or will we have to wait on those?
And “shtako”….really?
While I’m here, a question about Old Tongue runes from the Game of Thrones Wiki: carefully analyzing screencaps of the tournament from Season 1, the sigil of House Royce has appeared-on screen. There are also some behind-the scenes photos of concept art for the sigil (posted here: http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Old_Tongue )
So this is out first on-screen appearance of Old Tongue runes. Given that you devoted effort to making a *hypothetical* Dothraki writing system (even though they are officially illiterate), did you have any input into the Old Tongue runes that appear in the sigil of House Royce? Or, was this entirely a decision by graphic artist Jim Stanes, who handles all of the heraldry?
Because “runes” can be anything, but the ones for House Royce are not invented from scratch (i.e. they’re not Chinese pictograms): they appear to be Anglo-Saxon runes. I didn’t know if they said anything intelligible — this is the best quality screencap I could make of the sigil (it only briefly appears on-screen and in the background). However if you squint really hard, it *might* spell out “R-U-N” in Anglo-Saxon runes, i.e. “Rune”. I can’t make out the rest. But this led me to wonder if the rest of it said anything intelligible. Or maybe I’ve misidentified the system, and Futharc was used as the basis instead?
This is false. I never did this.
Nope. The first thing I ever heard about it was your comment here.
Those runes look randomly copy-pasted, they read: RUN-REFORM-YOUR-BLOOD-RUNS
Where can I find all the Irathient words? I would love to be able to find it all. Is there a website with it all?
Right now the best list available is here. Hopefully something more comprehensive will be coming out in the future!