{"id":6743,"date":"2019-08-23T14:30:59","date_gmt":"2019-08-23T14:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.utalk.com\/news\/?p=6743"},"modified":"2019-08-23T11:23:40","modified_gmt":"2019-08-23T11:23:40","slug":"the-plains-of-essos-the-final-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/the-plains-of-essos-the-final-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"The Plains of Essos: The Final Frontier"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Find out what Game of Thrones and Star Trek have in common and why fans of both will be living it up in Montreal this weekend!<\/em>
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You\u2019d be forgiven for not having heard of Marc Okrand or David Peterson, though it\u2019s likely that you\u2019ve seen some of their work. Both of these gentlemen are going to be speakers at LangFest and they have a particular job description in common\u2014both of them have created <\/em>languages for incredibly popular TV shows.
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Even if you\u2019re not a Trekkie, you\u2019ve probably heard of Klingons, the warrior race that feature more often than not as the bad guys in the Star Trek TV show and films. Okrand was hired initially to work on Vulcan dialogue required for the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.<\/em> Paramount Pictures then hired him to develop the entire language and coach the actors on it for another three films; he was then<\/em> asked to invent Klingon, too. His initial basis of the language actually came from a few samples spoken in Star Trek: The Motion Picture<\/em> by James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (or Scotty, as he\u2019s better known).
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Not a simple task! However, Okrand\u2019s early work with Native American languages influenced how he created Klingon, with some of the sounds he used not being present in any other language. Nowadays, there are only estimated to be 20-30 people who are conversationally fluent in Klingon, though there are many more people who are interested in learning it.
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As for Peterson\u2026 he created many of the languages featured on a TV show that took the world by storm when it first aired in 2011\u2014yes, we\u2019re talking about Game of Thrones.<\/em> Peterson had developed the Dothraki language before the books were even adapted to TV, but it came with a few initial constraints. One was that George R. R. Martin had already written several Dothraki words in his books, and so these needed to be the base that the language was built around. The second was that when creating the language, Peterson needed to be aware that everything should be easily pronounceable and learnable by the actors.
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He managed this, as most people are aware, then also going on to create the Valyrian languages used in Season Three. And these languages are popular\u2014while there is no consensus on the number of speakers, over one million people have started learning High Valyrian, which for a language less than ten years old, is a very impressive feat!
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Of course, these languages are both kind of niche, so if you\u2019re looking for a constructed language which has a larger community around it (and one where you don\u2019t have to read nearly two million words or watch 726 episodes and 12 films to get all the background info you need), then why not try Esperanto?
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Esperanto was created in the late 1800s by L. L. Zamenhof and is now the most widely-spoken constructed language in the world. It is estimated to have up to two million speakers\u2014including around a thousand native speakers!\u2014and most of them point out that Esperanto is relatively easy to learn; so great if you\u2019re learning your first foreign language. Zamenhof created it to serve as a universal second language to help foster peace and international understanding, which should be right up your street if you\u2019re a big Star Trek<\/em> fan. (Game of Thrones?<\/em> Uhh, not so much\u2026)
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Fancy learning one of these conlangs (constructed languages) right now? Sadly, we don\u2019t offer all of them yet. We do have Esperanto on our uTalk app,<\/strong><\/a> which means once you\u2019ve learnt the 2,500-or-so words and phrases for that, you could start using Esperanto as your base language and cement what you\u2019ve learnt even further.
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If you\u2019re really craving some Klingon or Dothraki in your life, however, there\u2019s a couple of solutions.
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For Klingon: we do have some of our older products\u2014Talk Now Klingon<\/a><\/strong> and Rhythms Klingon<\/strong><\/a>\u2014which were created with Marc Okrand\u2019s help and approved by him and CBS, who still own the copyright on the official dictionary and canonical descriptions of the language. Our Talk Now course was the first language course for Klingon written both in Latin and plqaD (the Klingon script) fonts, too.\u00a0
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For Dothraki: well, we have nothing for this yet. There are very few Dothraki courses anywhere, in fact\u2014somehow Valyrian is the Game of Thrones <\/em>language that has really taken off! But David Peterson did note that he used features from several different languages to create Dothraki, including Estonian<\/strong><\/a>, Turkish<\/a><\/strong>, Russian<\/a><\/strong>, and Swahili<\/strong><\/a>. And guess what? We do<\/em> offer all of those! So, if you\u2019d like to get a feel for Dothraki with languages you can speak with up to 166,000,000 other speakers, then why not give one of those a try?
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Oh, and if you do happen to be at LangFest this weekend, pop by and say hi! We have a stand and will be running a quiz on Saturday. We tested it out in the office this week\u2014it\u2019s sneakily difficult, so watch out for that!
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And if, after all that, you\u2019re still feeling really up for it, why not have a go at creating a language of your own? Maybe one day you\u2019ll be presenting at a language conference, too!
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\u011cis revido kaj bon\u015dancon! (That\u2019s Esperanto for goodbye and good luck!<\/em>)
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Find out what Game of Thrones and Star Trek have in common and why fans of both will be living it up in Montreal this weekend! You\u2019d be forgiven for not having heard of Marc Okrand or David Peterson, though it\u2019s likely that you\u2019ve seen some of their work. Both of these gentlemen are going … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1680,1673],"tags":[1674,1226,1675,1228,1679,467,1677,363,333,52,65,474,283,292,1676,1678],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}