Today was 'linguistics day' at Worldcon!
The fun began with a very nuce presentation by David Peterson on the development of the Dothraki language. Hw showed us how the initial language development process worked, and how he maintained communication with HBO during production of the TV series. He then presented a number of Dothraki phrases, illustrating different features of the language, and gave the audience a chance to read them back. Then, an audience member was selected to participate in a dialogue with David in Dothraki. Besides his excellent work on creating the language, David's command of the spoken language is outstanding (he later told me that if you are really speaking a language correctly, the who sense of your presentation should reflect the language it is given in). Then there was question and answer time, and lots of interesting questions were asked. David kept careful track of the names of the people asking questions. When the program was done, David told those that had asked questions to look on the site in a few days, and they should see their names translated into Dothraki!
An hour later, David was one of 5 presenters giving a program on general linguistics. The other presenters were Michael Capobianco, Peadar Ó Guilín, Stanley Schmidt, and Lawrence M. Schoen (of Klingon Language Institute fame). They gave an excellent overall presentation at the problems facing people setting out to create a language for their book, film, etc. This talk was looong (ran well over its assigned time slot), informative and often humorous. It also set the stage for the language construction workshop to follow.
The highly anticipated language construction workshop was worth the wait, and a bit different than I had thought it would be like. First, David gave us a history of constructed languages that was fascination. (Did you know the first conlanger we have record of was Hildegard Von Bingen way back in the 12th century?) After this presentation, the room was broken up into four groups. An experienced conlanger (all from the Language Creation Society) was placed in charge of each group. Working from a series of sealed envelopes, each group worked through a progressive series of challenging scenarios, each describing the steps necessary to create a believable constructed language. Although there were seven evolutionary steps planned for working our mini-conlangs into a believable language, there was only time to work through four of them. In any case, this was a tremendous learning experience, and it helped illustrate that creating a language and making it believable is not a trivial process.
There are two more linguistic panels tomorrow, but these will be an anticlimax compared to what we learned today!
