![]() “Once I had the words chopped, I had an even greater challenge: to create something grammatical that would have the same intended meaning as ‘Take all the gold and jewels’. “One thing that non-native speakers will do is mispronounce tough consonants … And since a geminate velar fricative would likely be flubbed by a non-native speaker, I decided that this verb would somehow relate to vekhat – a verb so semantically empty I could make it mean just about anything. “Something that helped me out tremendously was Glen’s character being non-Dothraki,” says Peterson. But for Peterson, the beauty of having invented your own language is that you can bend its rules to retrofix such production hiccups. The line Glen’s character Ser Jorah Mormont was asked to say was “Take all the gold and jewels”, which he rendered as Mas ovray movekkhi moskay. He did a pretty good job of imitating Dothraki syllable structure. ![]() ![]() I felt bad about that one, so I folded it in. “That was the last – or not the last line, but the last line of mine, in season two, when they had Iain Glen totally ad-lib something. “They emailed me at four in the morning, asking for a line and I didn’t get that request until I woke up and by then it was too late,” says David J Peterson, a co-founder of the Language Creation Society and father not only of Dothraki but of the high and low Valyrian languages used in Game of Thrones. In California, more than 5,000 miles away from the Thrones set in Northern Ireland, Dothraki’s creator is sleeping soundly – the one night he thought he could get away with a few extra hours of shut-eye. So you clear your throat, try to remember the gist of the language sounds, and go for it. And there’s a problem: the language expert who is supposed to be on call to tell you what to say - and how to say it - can’t be raised.
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