Dothraki
The Dothraki language is a constructed language from George RR Martin's fantasy novel The Song of Ice and Fire and the TV series Game of Thrones derived from it , in which the language is spoken by the Dothraki, a nomadic warrior people on the Dothraki Sea. The language was created for the television series by linguist David J. Peterson , based on words and phrases from the novels of George RR Martin. As of September 2011, the language had 3,163 words, not all of which were published. In 2012, 146 girls in the United States were called “khaleesi,” the Dothrak word for the wife of a khal, or ruler. This title was adopted in the television series by Daenerys Targaryen. Dothraki and Valyrian are considered to be the most compelling fantasy languages since Elvish by JRR Tolkien .
history
The Dothraki vocabulary was invented by David J. Peterson. HBO signed the Language Creation Society to develop a language. After an application process in which around 30 people took part, the choice fell on Peterson, who developed the Dothrak language. It delivered over 1,700 words to HBO before filming began. Peterson was inspired by George RR Martin's description of the language as well as real languages such as Turkish , Russian , Estonian , Inuktitut, and Swahili . His development of Dothraki aired on CNN's The Next List on April 8, 2012, and on January 8, 2017, on Tell the Truth . He also developed the Valyrian language for the third season of Game of Thrones .
Peterson had to take two aspects into account: the language had to match the information already given in the books, and it had to be easy to pronounce and learn for the actors. That is why there is no difference between breathed and non-breathed plosives as in English.
Phonology
David Peterson emphasized that most people probably didn't know what the Arabic language really sounds like, Dothrak might sound like Arabic to an untrained listener, and it certainly doesn't sound like Arabic to someone who knows Arabic. He imagined that it sounded like a mixture between Arabic (without the distinctive pharyngeal sounds) and Spanish . There is no separate writing system for Dothraki.
Consonants
There are 23 consonantic phonemes in the Dothraki language. The Latin letters are on the left, the IPA in brackets.
| labial | Dental | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | unvoiced | t [t̪] | k [k] | q [q] | ||||
| voiced | d [d̪] | g [ɡ] | ||||||
| Affricates | unvoiced | ch [tʃ] | ||||||
| voiced | j [dʒ] | |||||||
| Fricatives | unvoiced | f [f] | th [θ] | s [s] | sh [ʃ] | kh [x] | h [h] | |
| voiced | v [v] | z [z] | zh [ʒ] | |||||
| nasal | m [m] | n [n̪] | ||||||
| Rolled | r [r] | |||||||
| Tapped | r [ɾ] | |||||||
| Approximant | central | w [w] | y [j] | |||||
| lateral | l [l̪] | |||||||
The letters c and x are not used in Dothraki, c only appears in the combination ch .
b and p only appear in names like Bharbo and Pono . These consonants were used in the past and have changed to [f] and [v]. They can still appear as variants of [f] and [v].
Voiced plosives can be breathy, but the meaning of the word does not change.
The gemination of consonants is shown by graphemes whose spelling has been changed:
- kkh is pronounced / xx / (not / kx /)
- tth is pronounced / θθ / (not / tθ /)
- ssh is pronounced / ʃʃ / (not / sʃ /)
- zzh becomes / ʒʒ / (not / zʒ /)
- cch is pronounced / tt͡ʃ /
Vowels
Dothraki has four vowels:
| Vowels |
|---|
| i / i / |
| e / e / |
| o / o / |
| a / a / |
There are no diphthongs .
In the books of A Song of Ice and Fire , the u never appears as a vowel, it only occurs after q and only in names like Jhiqui and Quaro .
In a number of different vowels, each vowel represents a separate syllable, e.g. B. shierak [ʃi.e.ˈɾak] - star, rhaesh [ɾha.ˈeʃ] - land, khaleesi [ˈxa.l̪e.e.si] - queen.
The vowels / i, e, o, a / are pronounced [e, ɛ, ɔ, ɑ] after / q /. / o / becomes [ɤ] after dentals. / o / can be pronounced as [u] after [g], [k] and [x].
Web links
- http://wiki.dothraki.org (in English)