How the Russian language helped invent Dothraki from Game of Thrones
The University of California at Berkeley will offer students a course in artificial languages used in the television series “Game of Thrones,” in particular Dothraki. According to the online resource MashableThe university offers a course called “Linguistics 'Game of Thrones' and the art of inventing language”.
Lectures are given by David Peterson, a linguistics professor, author of Dothracian, high Valyrian, and a dozen other fictional languages for television series and films. According to the publication in the university newspaper Berkeley newsDuring the course, students will focus on the philology and details of language creation, and not on the world of fantasy Westeros.
According to Peterson, some grammatical constructions of the Dothraki language were borrowed from Russian. The professor explains: “One of the elements of the case system [in Dothraki] is directly related to this grammatical category in Russian, and the phonetics are largely due to Arabic and Spanish.”
It is known that in Dothraki there are five cases of nouns, a strict word order and a grammatically significant separation of animate and inanimate lexemes. Dothraki is an inflectional language. The vocabulary reflects the nomadic way of life of the prototype tribes of Dothraki who lived in the times of Genghis Khan, their Mongolian archetype. Using just a few phrases from the George R. R. Martin books on which the television series is based, Peterson built a new language, including 4, a thousand words.
It should be noted that previously the popular resource for learning foreign languages, Duolingo, announced a course in the High Valyrian language spoken by Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones.
Let us remind you that the action of the series, based on the series of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin “A Song of Ice and Fire”, takes place in an imaginary world, somewhat intersecting with the historical Middle Ages. The last, eighth season of Game of Thrones will be shown in 2018. The premiere of the first episode of the seventh season of Game of Thrones is scheduled for July 16 this year. In 2015, the series won 12 Emmy awards in just one season.
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