Messages

[osamva]

No, no real semantic difference I think. If you instead translate osamva as unbroken rather than "not broken" then you pretty much have an equivalent pair in English; "The sword is unbroken" and "The sword is not broken".

David mentioned in the e-mail answer that /jh/ is simply GRRM:s orthography for that sound which is why he used that instead of /zh/.

[Athjikhar]

Athjikhar should actually be athjhikhar but one of the /h/ must have been lost by GRRM somewhere. It means sickness so the city would be the "city of sickness".

What should the correct spelling of the city be then? (Vaes Athjhikhar,  Vaes Athjhikhari, etc.) The printed map has Vaes Athjikhari.

It should have been Vaes Athjhikhari. The /-i/ at the end is optional though in this type of construction. The /-i/ is a genitive decelnsion so that is what give the "of" in the English but with these cities the genitive ending can be left out and it would still translate the same way.

As for what is correct that is another question. The misspelling is what has been printed so that would perhaps make in canon in a way.

[Athjikhar]

OK, some more answers.

Athjikhar should actually be athjhikhar but one of the /h/ must have been lost by GRRM somewhere. It means sickness so the city would be the "city of sickness".

Ifeqevron is indeed a Dothraki word and it's the name of a deadly forrest spider.

Also Vojjor Samui should be Vojjor Samvi so that also seems like a typo introduced somewhere in the printing.

[VAES ATHJIKHARI]

Excellent information, thank you! I just double-checked - VAES ATHJIKHARI (formerly SALLOSH) is a ruined city north of the Dothraki Sea and south of the Bay of Tusks (Shivering Sea). It's shown on "The Dothraki Sea" map of "The Lands of Ice and Fire". Near Vaes Athjikhari is Vaes Leqse.

Two more placenames of possible Dothraki origin are the northern Kingdoms of the Ifeqevron (which I have seen discussed at Westeros.org ) by the Shivering Sea and Adakhakileki, a ruined city by the Poison Sea and the Bone Mountains.

Adakhakileki is definately Dothraki. It seems to be a compound word meaning "Eater of skins" or "Skineater" if you will.I'll ask David about the other one.

[Athjikhari]

I got a response for David:

Vaes Efe - City of shackles
Vaes Leqse - City of rats
Vaes Mejhah - City of whores
Vojjor Samui - Yes this should be broken gods (Vojjor Samva)
Yalli Qamayi - wailing children

David did not recognize what Athjikhari was suppose to be. Are you sure you have spellt it correctly?

I think you have gotten as far as we can with the known words. The translations you have done look correct to me. I would have called it "City of Waste" rather than "refuse" though simply because it's a more common day to day word.

I'll ask David about the unknown words.

If you want more inspiration check out the vocabulary here:  http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Vocabulary

[vaz]

Some words exist and some would need some creative translating.

First of all the words that exist:

vaz = storm
gorat = to charge, to give the command Charge! would be Gori!
az = blade
lorrat = to blink, again this is the infinitive so depending on the use it would have to be conjugated.

Now there is no word outright for assassin that we know of. If you want to just say "a killer" it would be addrivak. For something like a contract killer you could perhaps say Addrivak athjerari which would be something like "A trading killer". If you want to convey the word assassin as someone who kills in secret then you could perhaps say addrivak torga essheyi which literally means "killer under a roof" but more generally means "secret killer" since the Dothraki believe that things should be done out in the open so things that are done under a roof are secretive.

I have finished the first edition of the High Valyrian lexicon at the Valyrian wiki! Enjoy: http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Valyrian/High_Valyrian_Vocabulary

The vocabulary will keep growing and verbs and adjectives will be added soon.

That formatting looks really cluttered. First of all I think the noun classes should just be marked with a single letter so "nl." "ns." "na." and "nt.".

Is there really a need to list person and number in the vocabulary? Usually all nouns should just be listed in the nominative in a dictionary.

What person? What do you mean? There are no verbs yet. They are all listed in the nominative which is not stated and they are in "sg." because there are also collectives relexicalized.

The formatting is exactly the same as the one used for the Dothraki vocabulary list.

Edit: Ok, now I got you. It's not marked for "person", what you see there is the gender and the declension type, so lunar 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, then solar 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc and so on. The singular could be suppressed but we were thinking that it might be useful to contrast with collectives. Also I don't think a one letter abbreviation is a good idea, since the genders are very peculiar, not that common and people could get confused by "na." and such. Maybe the best way to abbreviate them would be aq., sol., lun. and ter. Whatever people think is more helpful. What do you think?

Ah ok.

Now it looks a little better but it's still a little long for my taste. Perhaps shortening them like you suggested here would be good. The problem I find is that I keep having to scan through the row to find the word meaning and that should ideally be what directly catches your eye when you look at the row.

How about for example:

n.1aq.
n.1ter.
n.2sol.
n.3lun.

That way it be short and uniform and wouldn't distract the eyes from the main part of the row.

I have finished the first edition of the High Valyrian lexicon at the Valyrian wiki! Enjoy: http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Valyrian/High_Valyrian_Vocabulary

The vocabulary will keep growing and verbs and adjectives will be added soon.

That formatting looks really cluttered. First of all I think the noun classes should just be marked with a single letter so "nl." "ns." "na." and "nt.".

Is there really a need to list person and number in the vocabulary? Usually all nouns should just be listed in the nominative in a dictionary.

[Hash]

Also note that stating that "hash" means "do" is very confusing for a paper, I suggest you amend that.

Cheers

Yes, good point. Hash does not simply mean "do" but instead it is a general question word for yes or no questions and would be translated differently into English depending on the question.

For example:

Hash yer dothrae chek? would translate as Are you riding well?

The reason for your confusion is that in Dothraki ordinals are not adjectves but instead they are nouns and using them is a bit different than using the adjective ordinals found in English.

Check out this post on the blog where David explains it; http://www.dothraki.com/2011/10/numbers-numbers-everywhere/

As for contacting David there are several ways. You can ask questions in the comments section on his blog. You can find him on twitter as @dedalvs. His tumblr (which apparently is one of the top 5 most visited tumblr sites ) is http://dedalvs.tumblr.com/ and if you want to ask him something in private you can e-mail him at [email protected]

Here is Davids appearance on Last Call with Carson Daly. There are some graphics that pass by in the background that give information that looks like Valyrian and Castithan or Irathient.

http://www.nbc.com/last-call-with-carson-daly/video/david-peterson/n36852/

I'm new to the site and extremely interested in learning and spreading the language of High Valyrian. I've read this thread and feel like I'm missing something. Everyone is talking about where to host this content when as far as I can tell, we have no substantial content whatsoever. Is David Peterson legally unable to release his full dictionaries and grammar rules to the public? I've seen tidbits from the show on his blog (http://www.dothraki.com/tag/high-valyrian/) but nothing more. Does anyone know if he will eventually be releasing the official vernacular?

I'm an experienced iOS and web developer would be happy to create both a site and app dedicated to learning Valyrian. But I don't have time to scour David's blog for content, or to watch each week's scenes over and over again.

Yes, HBO owns both the Dothraki and Valyrian languages so he can't just release a whole dictionary without their permission. All the Dothraki that is on the wiki are things that we have gathered together from public sources over the past three years. The same will probably have to be done with Valyrian unless HBO changes their strategy. We know that they have been talking to publishers about a Dothraki dictionary but none have been to keen on the idea yet at least.