Topics

31

Dothraki Language Updates / Things learnt from other sources.

« on: April 05, 2011, 07:26:42 am »

As mentioned in one of the IRC chats, David Peterson was recently interviewed by The Daily Beast. An article has now appeared that among other things feature material from that interview. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-04/game-of-thrones-10-secrets-about-hbos-adaptation-of-a-song-of-ice-and-fire-by-george-rr-martin/

David talks about some of his inspirations for the language and also gives us a new phrase from the books:

Vizhadi vizhadaan norethi shafki

Silver for the silver of your hair.

This obviously gives us two new words:

vizhad=silver 
noreth=hair

32

Dothraki Language Updates / Things learnt from IM.

« on: April 04, 2011, 05:52:41 pm »

I just chatted a bit with David Peterson over AIM to get some questions answered. Here is what was learnt.

First of all I asked about the relationship between verbs and certain mouns. We have for example the verb dothralat which mean to ride and dothrak that means rider. Since we have a lot of words that is some type of person that has the ending -ak I figured that they work the same way. I asked David about this and he confirmed that this is true. -ak is like an agentive suffix. This means two things. We have a bunch of nouns that we can now form verbs out of and we also have lots of verbs that we can form some type of agent nouns out of.  It won't always be straightforward what the new word will mean or how common it would be in the language etc but it wouldn't be wrong per se especially in the right context.

Some of the new words that have been derived in this way is:

fonat=to hunt
verat=to travel
vichomerat="to be respectful"

Another word, sajat, can also be formed but it's not known right now what it means. We also have the word ifak=foreigner but that meaning is only metaphorical. We already know the corresponding verb ifat to mean to walk so the literal translation of the word ifak is walker which of course is a good word to describe foreigners for the dothraki.

This also confirms a translation I had guess which was that awazak=screamer.

I also oncfirmed another translation. We guessed that the word as means words which is true but it is the accusative form. The nominative is ase.
The accusative for inanimate nouns is formed by dropping the last vowel as long as the remaining word doesn't violate the rule of what consonants or clusters a word can end on.

There are two ways of saying "you" depending on who is listening. The common word to use is yer but when you want to be respectful you instead use the word shafka. Furthermore the word shafki means your and shafkea is the allative case.

-oon is the ablative suffix and -aan is the allative suffix.

The word vos=not

In sentences where there is a controlverb there is a complementizer that is added to the noun.

Example: Anha goshok mehrazef shafki athiroe.

I am.sure that.horse your will survive.

the prefix me- is the complementizer in this case. It can in this example be compared to the role that the word that has in the sentence "I'm sure that your horse will survive". It doesn't always work like the english that but in this case it works ok.

Also David says hi to everyone.

33

HBO: Game of Thrones / Making of Dothraki video coming soon.

« on: March 17, 2011, 11:17:10 am »

Comcast has announced a new partnership with HBO where they are releasing lots of previews and interviews ahead of the Game of Thrones premiere. In their announcement they also mention that there will be a video about the creation of the Dothraki language. http://blog.comcast.com/2011/03/get-ready-for-game-of-thrones.html

We'll keep you posted about when this video will show up.

34

HBO: Game of Thrones / First example of spoken dothraki.

« on: March 16, 2011, 06:49:46 pm »

There are some new featurette videos released on comcasts VOD site fancast and one of them features Khal Drogo who gives us the first example of spoken dothraki. It appears that the videos are georestricted to the US but they have also appeared on youtube.com already. Take a look fast because I don't know if they will be allowed to stay up since comcast apparently has a rather long exclusive on them.

Targaryen Portrait Khal Drogo

It's hard to make out what he's saying though. I can't really make out what syllables are part of a longer word or what words are just monosyllabic. If I were to venture a guess then the first word he says could be "ma" and in the middle I think I hear a "fin". The end could be "tih mae" though the "tih" could very easily just be the end of a longer word however. The rest I can't really make out what word he is using or if it even resembles anything we have seen yet.

35

HBO: Game of Thrones / Momoa worked hard on Dothraki

« on: March 13, 2011, 09:16:21 am »

In an interview with Jamie Sives who plays Jory Cassel in the series we learn that he spent a lot of time with Jason Momoa during the production:

I spent almost every day with a guy who has became a friend for life and that's Jason Mamoa [sic] (Khal Drogo). Our characters were not in contact but Jason had so much Dothraki prep to do he was around the whole time. He was in Malta the whole 8 weeks I was there and not shooting so we had a ball.

We see here that Momoa has had to put a lot of time into learning his dialogue which is a good sign considering the hopes we have that the dothraki in the series will be both correct and plentiful.

36

Dothraki Language Updates / Dothraki pronounciation

« on: February 13, 2011, 03:42:23 pm »

From the IRC chat with David Peterson we got a little more info on dothraki pronounciation. (Transcript slightly edited to group things by context.)

<ingsve>   double ee's are pronounced like the spanish creer is that correct?
<ingsve>   as in khal-e-esi?
<DavidJPeterson>   Yep.
<DavidJPeterson>   It'll probably be pronounced differently at certain times by some in the series in various contexts. Nothing to be done about that.

<ingsve>   is there any instances where letters are pronounced diffrently than in the phonology? or are all letters pronounced the same no matter where in a word they come?
<DavidJPeterson>   I tried to make the romanization phonetic so as to avoid the need for that.
<DavidJPeterson>   However, there are instances.
<DavidJPeterson>   Should be slight.
<DavidJPeterson>   Or happen naturally.
<DavidJPeterson>   For example, vowels preceded by [q] are pronounced differently.
<ingsve>   as diffrent vowel sounds than the 4 we know about?
<DavidJPeterson>   Phonetic sounds, yes. The 4 vowel phonemes really float around.
<DavidJPeterson>   /i/ > [e]; /e/ > [E]; /o/ >

• ; /a/ > [A] / q_ (if you know ling rules).

<DavidJPeterson>   the sound with the least variability is probably /i/.
<DavidJPeterson>   Both /o/ and /a/ travel around quite a bit in their respective areas (low for /a/; back [-low] for /o/).

<ingsve>   you seem to like the kh phoneme
<ingsve>   is that always pronouced

<DavidJPeterson>   Kh will float around.
<DavidJPeterson>   Probably more palatal before front vowels.
<DavidJPeterson>   The velar fricative will vary from a velar to a palatal fricative (always voiced).
<DavidJPeterson>   Depending on the vowels.
<DavidJPeterson>   Something like the ach-laut/ich-laut thing in German.
<DavidJPeterson>   But both progressive and regressive.

37

Dothraki Language Updates / Verb conjugation

« on: February 09, 2011, 11:23:35 pm »

Here is a quick look at what is known about verb conjugation

conjugation	infinitive	translation	categories
fichi		take	IMP Sing.
samveno	samvenolat	surpassed	3rd p. Sing. PST.
samvo	samvolat	broke	3rd p. Sing. PST.
assamve	assamvat	broke	3rd p. Sing. PST.
oge	ogat	slaughtered	3rd p. Sing. PST.
ahhas	ahhasat	sharpened	3rd p. Sing. PST.
kaffe	kaffat	crushed	3rd p. Sing. PST.
dothrae	dothralat	rides	3rd p. Sing. PRES
vichitera		shivers	3rd p. Sing. PRES
zireyesee	zireyeselat	offends	3rd p. Sing. PRES
athiroe		will survive	3rd p. Sing. FUT
ofrakhi		will not touch	2nd p. Sing. FUT, NEG

From this we can see that there isn't really a clear pattern connected to person or tense like in a lot of common languages. This possibly means that conjugation will be affected by other grammatical categories. There also seems to be diffrent types of conjugation. In one instance we see the infinitive ending -at change into -e (assamvat->assamve) but in another case the infinitive ending is simply dropped (samvolat->samvo). One diffrence between these verbs is that one is transitive and the other is intransitive and given what we know this seems to be an important distinction that will probably have impact on the grammar.

Another thing is that if the word ofrakhi is correctly translated it seems that taking the negative of a verb is buildt into the conjugation.

Finally, we have also seen the word laz which seems to mean both can and could.

38

Dothraki Language Updates / Various affixes.

« on: February 07, 2011, 09:29:59 pm »

Dothraki will be full of various affixes. Here are some of the ones that we have seen so far.

First we have an example that was officially mentioned in one of the interviews with David Peterson.

as- -an	positive comparative	asafazhan	hotter
os- -an	negative comparative	osafazhan	less hot
as- -an -az	positive superlative	asafazhanaz	hottest
as- -an -oz	negative superlative	asafazhanoz	least hot

Other circumfixes we have seen are:

ath- -zar	unknown	athastokhdeveshizaroon	from nonsense
ath- -ar	derivation?	athjahakar	pride, prowess (formed from the stem jahak meaning hair-braid)

A couple of the identified suffixes are:

-oon	ablative case	mahrazhoon	from the man, by the man
-i	plural, diminutive, genetive	lajaki	warriors

They seem to be both rather common, especially -i. Another suffix is -aan as in arakhaan which is also not known yet. There are also several nouns that end in -asar like for example khalasar, ramasar, fonakasar which suggests that -asar might also be a suffix of some sort.

One thing to keep in mind is that Peterson mentioned in one interview that he has deliberately tried to avoid being straight forward and formulaic when it comes to forming words. He writes:

"For example, in Dothraki, it’s a simple matter to separate affixes from stems, but it’s not always simple to attach a meaning to a given affix. // Looking at the forms above, the stem afazh (“hot”) can be picked out fairly easily, but assigning a single meaning to each affix becomes either a very difficult process, or a trivial process (i.e. simply restating what’s there). However, it would seem a mistake to treat each form as entirely unrelated to the rest (i.e. as if each one had an entirely different affix)"

39

General Discussion / Issue with posting

« on: February 06, 2011, 11:30:21 pm »

Whenever I post in the forum I get an error message. I have tried it in both Firefox and in Chromium.

This webpage has a redirect loop
The webpage at http://forum.dothraki.org/index.php/board,1.0.html has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

I don't think it's a cookie problem so it's probably some forum config problem.

40

Introductions / Hello I'm Ingsve

« on: February 06, 2011, 11:23:05 pm »

Hi, my name is Ingemar and I'm a physicist from Gothenburg, Sweden.

I got into ASOIAF through the CCG A Game of Thrones where I was player and an active member of the online community for several years. It wasn't until after I had played hte game for a while that I read the books which meant that I have a slightly diffrent view of various houses in the books than most other fans. For instance the first house I played was Greyjoy so I have much more love for the Greyjoys than the common fan who only know them through a few chapters in the books while I relate to them in a diffrent way because of the cards.

Unlike other people here I have no background in linguistics at all but I'm interested in languages and I have learnt a lot in the past few months since got involved in the (yet tiny) dothraki community.
I have an idea of perhaps translating some of the CCG cards into Dothraki one day but we'll see how feasable something like that would be later on. First of all I tend to become as fluent as possible.

41

Dothraki Language Updates / Phrases

« on: February 01, 2011, 08:28:59 pm »

Here are all the phrases that have appeared somewhere yet. EDIT: This list is not up to date and it probably won't be updated much since there are so many phrases around by now.

hash yer ray nesi? - Did you know?
Vos arakhaan feveya qoyoon - Not to a sword thirsting for blood.
Oqet vichitera oma vafikhoon - The sheep shivers without it's wool.
Achrakh yeroon zireyesee hrazef anni, zhey ifak! Your stink offends my horse, foreigner!
Asshekh Dothraki samveno 2,300 as  - Today dothraki broke 2300 words.
Athchomar chomakea, zhey lajaki vezhveni. Anha goshok mehrazef shafki athiroe; me haja lekhaan k'athtihari. - Respect to those that are respectful, great warriors. I'm sure your horse will survive; he seems strong enough.
Fichi jin hlak kherikhi. Mori nroji ma nizhi. Me azho anni shafkea. - Take these leather gloves. They are thick and tough. It is my gift to you.
Hash anha laz adothrak shafki, hash ashilok khal shafki. - As I can ride by your side, so shall I meet your khal.
jin ave sekke erin anni ma dorvoon - this very kind father of mine with a goat
jin ave sekke verven anni m’orvikoon - this very violent father of mine with a whip
Khalakka dothrae mr’anha. - A prince rides within me.
Me oge oqet oskikh He slaughtered a sheep yesterday.
Yer ofrakhi vosecchi sajoes mae! - You will never touch her steed!
Me ray kaffe rek tokikes. - It already crushed that fool.
Vizhadi vizhadaan norethi shafki Silver for the silver of your hair.
M'athchomaroon, zhey khaleesi! Memzir shafki choma anna. With respect Khaleesi! Your tweet respects me. (or more likely "Your tweet honors me" or something like that.)
Hrazef ost gazer. The horse bit the apple.
Azhi anhaan asshilat Allow me to present...
Moves lekhes zhorre shafki Invent your own language.
Shekh ma shieraki anni My sun and stars
Jalan atthirar anni Moon of my life
Me allayafa anna! I like it. (It pleases me)
Akat Dalen m'Atthi: Firesof jeshi ma vorsasi! - 2011: Year of ice and fire.
Anha tih mahrazhes fin kasha chakat karlin - I saw a man that lasted twenty miles.
Eyel varthasoe she ilekaan rikhoya arrekaan vekha vosi yeroon vosma tolorro! - The rain will fall on your rotting skin until nothing is left of you but bones.

42

Dothraki Language Updates / Words with unknown translation

« on: February 01, 2011, 07:11:41 pm »

Here is a list I have of words that have appeared in some context that we yet don't know the english translation of. At some places we have a guess but without confirmation of those guesses I will still keep them on the list. Some words are known as a phrase or expression but the litteral meaning of the words are unclear. This post will be updated as we learn more.

aheshke jada   unknown
arrek
edavrasao   Unknown conjugation of davrasar=to be useful. Could mean some form of ”good"
eyel   unknown
goshok   am sure ?
ilek         unknown
kasha   unknown
rikhoya   unknown infinitive is rikhoy probably an adjective
varthasoe    unknown
vorsas   unknown