In ‘Game of Thrones,’ a Language to Make the World Feel Real - Amy Chozick NYTimes.com

Looks like I should take up creating fictional languages for science fiction movies:

Amy Chozick NYTimes.com

“The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over,” said Paul R. Frommer, professor emeritus of clinical management communication at the University of Southern California who created Na’vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in “Avatar.” Disney recently hired Mr. Frommer to develop a Martian language called Barsoomian for “John Carter,” a science-fiction movie to arrive in March.

The shift is slowly transforming the obscure hobby of language construction into a viable, albeit rare, career and engaging followers of fantasies like “Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones” and “Avatar” on a more fanatical level.

At “Game of Thrones” viewing parties in San Francisco, fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. Last October, a group of Na’vi speakers from half a dozen countries convened in Sonoma County, Calif., for a gathering known as “Teach the Teachers.” Mr. Frommer gave attendants tips on grammar and vocabulary and fielded any questions they had about the language. The rural, wooded setting felt “almost like being on Pandora,” he said. At a question-and-answer session in July that he participated in, at least a dozen attendants rattled off their questions in fluent Na’vi.

“There’s been a sea change in Hollywood. They realize there’s a fan base out there that wants constructed languages,” said Matt Pearson, a linguistics professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He created Thhtmaa (pronounced tukhh-t’-mah), the language of termite-like aliens in the short-lived NBC series “Dark Skies.”

“Game of Thrones,” based on the best-selling series of novels “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin, may be the biggest television showcase for an invented language. The books, which primarily follow feuding kingdoms in the fictional land of Westeros, had a scattering of Dothraki words, but the show’s executive producers wanted a fully formed language.

Several scenes in the first season of “Game of Thrones” take place entirely in Dothraki with English subtitles. In one episode the shirtless tribal leader Khal Drogo delivered a monologue for two and a half minutes in Dothraki, with its subject-verb-object structure and no copula, or linking verb.

I wonder what the sentence structure of Thhtmaa is like: Japanese, Bantu, Russian?

Wht didn’t Chozick mention ‘city talk’ from Blade Runner, or the argot that Anthony Burgess dreamed up for Clockwork Orange?

Looks like I should be writing a book on artificial languages in movies and TV. Like Umberto Eco’s The Search For The Perfect Language, which I’ve read.