Topics

16

Announcements / 'Conlang' now an official English word!

« on: June 14, 2014, 02:14:45 am »

Today is a big day for conlamgers to celebrate! The word 'conlang' has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive dictionary of the English language. Even better, in the blog entry announcing the new word, the Dothraki language gets a shout-out!

http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/june-2014-update/new-words-notes-june-2014/

And here is the actual entry (you have to be subscribed to the OED to read the full entry):

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/405263

Thanks goes to David Peterson, who brought this to my attention through a post to the Language Creation Society list.

17

Announcements / Dothraki language book announced!

« on: June 05, 2014, 12:59:27 pm »

On June 2nd, David Peterson made a big announcement: A Dothraki language learning book/CD will soon be available. In addition to the book and CD, there will also be an online component, as well as an IOS app (I've asked David about an Android app as well). This is being published as part of the Living Language series of books. You can learn more about it from David him self here:

http://www.dothraki.com/2014/06/chafka-jada/

You can preorder the book, the online portion, and the IOS app here:

http://livinglanguage.com/dothraki

I hope everyone here is excited about this as I am. I suspect that this will be useful to both beginners and experienced Dothraki speakers alike!

18

Beginners / Happy mother's day

« on: May 08, 2014, 12:10:06 am »

Is this a fair attempt?

Layafat Maj asshekhqoyi - Happy Mothers Day

Or should Layafat be simply Layaf here?

19

Announcements / Planned system outage

« on: May 05, 2014, 12:58:29 am »

To all users of this site.
    A systemwide outage of all the Dothraki and Valyrian services here will be occurring on Tuesday, May 6th. Here are details from Marki of the LearnNavi side of this server:

To all members:
  Please note that the main LearnNavi server will be unavailable from 10:00am (US Central Daylight Time) on Tuesday, May 6th until 10:00am CDT on Wednesday,  May 7th. This planned downtime is for a complete system backup in preparation for the hard drive array upgrade as well as the actual upgrade itself.  ALL web services will be unavailable during this time, as well as the IRC server.

Other sites that will also be unavailable include dothraki.org and others.

Markì (Toruk Makto)

So be prepared!

Hrakkar

20

Announcements / Changes to firewall rules

« on: August 19, 2013, 12:44:24 pm »

As many of you know, the Dothraki/Valyrian website, wiki, forums and dictionary are graciously hosted for us by Learnnavi.org on their server. Due to incessant problems with Chinese web crawlers (that Marki discussed with me during AvatarMeet), the firewall protecting this server had to be altered to reject inquiries from these web crawlers. Although unlikely, this could affect some legitimate Chinese users of this site. I will quote Learnnavi system administrator Marki here, who provides some more background on this, and what to do if a Chinese user does inadvertently get locked out:

Unfortunately owing to the total inability of the Chinese censorship webcrawlers (aka the "great firewall of China) to follow the robot rules set on the LearnNavi.org domain and their incessant slamming of our resources, I have had to add a deny filter for the IP range of 123.151.148.0/22. There is a distinct possibility that this may deny access to some of our Chinese tsmuk, although I am hoping this IP prefix is just for the crawlers.  If anyone hears of any LN soaia that have been denied, please let me know at [email protected] so I can add some specific allows for them.

Thanks!

Markì

21

Announcements / Change to the Dothraki/Valyrian wiki

« on: August 01, 2013, 01:33:51 pm »

This is kind of a late announcement, as the change has already happened.

Originally, the URL for (originally) the Dothraki wiki, and now the Dothraki/Valyrian wiki was wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/MAIN_PAGE The extra 'dothraki' was at best kind of inconvenient, and at worst a nuisance, especially to Valyrian users of the site.

At AvatarMeet this year, I discussed this with Marki, the administrator of the LearnNavi server (where the Dothraki/Valyrian language stuff all lives). He was already aware there was an issue with the way the entire wiki was originally set up, and he was already thinking about fixing this. Well, it was fixed soon afterwards. Although removing the extra 'dothraki' did not break anything internally (that I am aware of, please let me know if you find something!), it undoubtedly broke links that people have to the wiki. I apologize for this, but this shouldn't be necessary again. This change also poises the site to handle any additional GoT/ASOAIF languages that might come along.

If you have questions about this, don't hesitate to ask them!

22

Valyrian Language Updates / The High Valyrian Dictionary Thread

« on: June 15, 2013, 11:48:09 pm »

The High Valyrian dictionary will be here sooner than you think! 

23

Announcements / Website title

« on: June 15, 2013, 12:22:39 pm »

When Payoang began altering the main Dothraki website to also handle Valyrian, he changed the title to be 'Languages of Westeros'. I think everyone here knows that this is not exactly correct, as Valyrian is little-spoken in Westeros, and Dothraki not at all. So, what would you have for a new title? Here are two I propose:

The languages of Ice and Fire
The Tongues of Ice and Fire

Do you have a better idea?

24

Valyrian Language Updates / Valyrian forums are now online!

« on: June 06, 2013, 12:58:50 am »

It would appear that LearnNavi founder and overall administrator 'Seabass' has taken it upon himself to get the Valyrian forums going here. Kirimvose, zhey Seabass (thank you! (in mixed Dothraki/Valyrian)).

I can also report that the frame of the Valyrian wiki has been built, and turned over to some 'Valyrian power users' to begin populating it. Expect to see a link to it soon! Let me know if you are interested in contributing at this early stage and I will give you a link.

25

Announcements / BayCon 2013 MiniMeet!

« on: May 27, 2013, 01:34:31 am »

I just finished a wonderful day at the BayCon 2013 Science Fiction Convention in Santa Clara, California. One activity planned for the convention was a meetup between David Peterson, Dothraki.org community members Daenerys and CrownOfGold, and myself. This would follow a presentation by David on a panel discussion about creating constructed languages for science fiction stories ad TV.

 The panel consisted of David Peterson, writer/linguist Juliette Wade, and a third person who is a television producer/writer. It was a lively and interesting discussion that covered everything from vowel harmony to communication by urine odor. There were about 40 people in attendance, which was a very good attendance for a medium-sized science fiction convention. (We maybe had 30 people for a panel on the Na'vi language back in 2010.)

Completely unannounced, LearnNavi community member Omängum Fra'uti and his wife Jennifer surprised me by showing up for this panel. After the panel, Omängum and Jennifer were invited by David to join us for dinner. We ended up eating at a restaurant that served Chinese dumplings and other tasty things. We finished our evening together at a Chinese pastry shop, where we enjoyed 'egg pastry' while playing a couple rounds of the card game 'Fluxx'. It was an exceptionally fine evening, and capped off what has been the most enjoyable day of 2013 so far!

Here are a few pictures. The first picture shows David during the panel discussion:


Here's a picture of (L to R) Jennifer (who is also a linguist), Omängum Fra'uti and David Peterson, taken while we were waiting for our food to arrive:


Finally, here's a picture of (L to R) CrownOfGold, Daenerys and myself (Yeah, I know I was wearing a Na'vi shirt!):

26

Announcements / Valyrian comong soon!

« on: May 23, 2013, 01:42:04 pm »

Keep an eye open for big changes at Dothraki.org. It looks like the changes to support Valyrian will be here sooner rather than later! I'll pst news here as I get it.

27

General Discussion / Dothraki Christmas song

« on: December 13, 2012, 10:34:26 pm »

Here is my attempt to translate the most ubiquitous and universal of all Christmas songs: 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas'!

Last Monday night during the IRC chat, we worked out the chorus, for which David Peterson gave us a word we can use for celebrations, such as Christmas (which the Dothraki very likely do not celebrate!), namely vitteyqoyi So for that we have the following translation:

[Za-LAK VI-tey-qoi DA-vra (qoth sen) We wish you a merry Christmas 3X
Ma fi-re-sof sa-sha la-ya-fa And a happy new year. (layafa is a new word from layafat 'to be happy'.)

These are 'blessed'. But now, we need verses, or at least the first verse. Here is my first try:

Nesikh davra(i) fich kisha Good tidings we bring
Ha yeraan ma yeri okeo(es) To you and your kin
neshikh davra qisi vitteyqoy Good tidings of Christmas
Ma fi-re-sof sa-sha la-ya-fa And a happy new year!

I had to truncate a couple of suffixes to make this reasonably singable. Those are the parts above in parenthesis.
Comments? Ma Qvaak, rip and tear!

28

Beginners / Epenthetic E patterns

« on: November 04, 2012, 10:02:55 pm »

From the wiki, to demonstrate the use of epenthetic /-e/ on inanimate nouns:

        khewo → khewe
        mawizzi → mawizze
        alegra → alegre
        kendra → kendre
        zhalia → zhalie

Per the text given, these all make sense, but the last one. zhalia does not end with a lone vowel. Why does it get the /-e/?

29

Announcements / We have been moved up!

« on: October 01, 2012, 12:55:34 pm »

As most of you know, our Dothraki language site is graciously hosted by the folks at LearnNavi. Recently, they have done a major redesign of the LearnNavi homepage. Besides looking much nicer, a link to Dothraki.org is now prominently featured!

Check it out at http://www.learnnavi.org

30

HBO: Game of Thrones / GoT season 1 wins Hugo!

« on: September 03, 2012, 10:56:17 am »

The first season of HBO's Game of Thrones TV series won a Hugo award last night for "Best Dramatic Presentation - long form". This award was given at the 70th World Science Fiction Convention, A.K. A. 'Chicon 7', in Chicago IL. On hand to receive the award was the show's executive producer David Benioff, as well as George R.R. Martin. Commenting on the Award, Mr. Martin commented that he hopes the series will go on 'for many years'. Athdavrazar! to all involved, and I think those of us in the Dothraki speakers' community can certainly share in the excitement!

GRRM's most recent installment in the ASOIAF series, 'A Dance With Dragons' was also up for a Hugo for 'best novel', but it did not win. Perhaps next time!