CHAPTER 7
MOTHER TONGUE OF DRAGONS
Mother Tongue of Dragons: 
The Magical Science of Inventing Languages
In 2012, 146 babies born in the US and 50 babies born in the UK were named Khaleesi, to the horror of snobs everywhere. Of course, we know this is in honour of Daenerys Targaryen, who is styled Khaleesi of Great Grass Sea, as well as Mother of Dragons, Queen of Meereen, and, in the TV show at least, Wearer of Wigs Extraordinaire. Naming your children after a popular fictional character is nothing new. In the early 20th century almost every Tom, Dick and Harry was named Wendy, after the popular heroine in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. However, this cherubic glut of Khaleesis is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, it isn’t a first name at all. In fact, it’s a title, roughly translating as ‘Queen’ or ‘Wife of the Khal’. Second, the title is taken from an entirely fictional Game of Thrones language known as Dothraki.
Attitudes to made-up languages–like some of the languages themselves–can be a bit odd. JRR Tolkien famously created not just individual languages, but languages that were interrelated the way that, say, English and French are. And everyone was mostly impressed (he was an Oxford University don after all, and some said that Lord of the Rings was really just a setting to show off the linguistic jewels he’d polished over the years). However, other forays into language creation have not garnered so much admiration.
One of the first full languages created for a fictional people was Klingon, for the Star Trek franchise. As languages go, Klingon has an interesting history. The first few words were uttered in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and devised by actor James Doohan who plays Scotty (of ‘Beam me up’ notoriety). This sounds like a challenge for any actor, but during the D-Day landings in World War II, Doohan was shot six times on Juno beach, so some linguistic frippery was probably nothing he couldn’t handle.
When Leonard Nimoy (Spock) was directing the third Star Trek film, The Search for Spock, he wanted the language to expand and not just sound like gibberish, so he hired linguist Marc Okrand to create a fully-fledged alien tongue, with a grammar based on those initial dozen or so words from Scotty. Thus a legend–or rather, a tantalisingly geeky opportunity to learn a proper alien language–was born. And the challenge was taken up with some enthusiasm by die-hard fans.
As any nerd worth their eight-or-more-sided dice will tell you, Klingon has flourished over the years and there now exists a Klingon language version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Nevertheless, ‘Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use,’ notes Wikipedia–am I imagining a touch ruefully? (Though someone has requested a citation for this, perhaps highly controversial, suggestion.)
In her 2009 book, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language, Arika Okrent looks to internet message boards to detail the attitudes to those Klingonophones in the science fiction community. It makes for sobering reading. One particularly bad burn suggests that Klingon speakers ‘provide excellent reasons for forced sterilisation. Then again, being able to speak Klingon pretty much does this without surgery.’ Ouch. And this was on slashdot.org–the website billed as ‘News for Nerds’.
In the interests of balancing this scurrilous libel, I refer you to the story of computational linguist Dr d’Armond Speers, who decided to bring up his baby son Alec speaking Klingon, while his wife spoke to their son in English (to ensure Alec would grow up bilingual/not too horrendously bullied). Dr Speers showed admirable commitment to the task in hand, even singing the Klingon Imperial Anthem, ‘May the Empire Endure’,at bedtime as a lullaby to his son (sample lyric: ‘Our Empire is wonderful, and if anyone disagrees/we will crush them beneath our boots’). Little Alec picked it up. But unfortunately the limitations of the invented tongue gradually became apparent and the boy began to speak more and more English and less and less Klingon–though his dad observed that when he spoke the constructed language he did so perfectly, and never got confused with English words.
Last time we checked in, Alec was a teenager and, according to Dr Speers, apparently retains little or no knowledge of, or interest in, speaking Klingon. Ah! Youth–and Klingon–are wasted on the young.
The Dothraki language had a similar genesis to Klingon. In the novel cycle, George RR Martin had already used a handful of Dothraki words, based loosely on ideas of how a mix of Arabic and Spanish might sound to someone who spoke neither tongue. So, when Game of Thrones’ producers came to seek out new words, and boldly go-build-a-syntax where no-one but GRRM had gone before, they already had a few (at or akat) constraints in mind. The language had to fit in with phrases readers already knew, but it also had to be easily learnable and pronounceable for the actors (who actually rehearse their Dothraki lines in English, to get the sense across). After two months of competition between members of the Language Creation Society, two punishing rounds had whittled down the would-be Dothraki-creators to five word warriors. Of these final five, the triumphant Stallion that Mounts the World (or at least the Dictionary) was announced as David J Peterson.
Interestingly, the creator of Dothraki was inspired not by Star Trek but by watching Star Wars. He recalls a moment in his childhood, watching the scene in Return of the Jedi where Princess Leia, disguised as a bounty hunter, rescues Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt’s palace. Chewbacca is her pretend captive bounty, but to add to her exotic, foreign disguise, Leia pretends to negotiate a price for him in a language unknown to Jabba (and, apparently, to anyone who has given a thought to how human languages work).
Using the in-on-it C-3PO as Jabba’s interpreter, Leia commences her brief but not uncomplicated arbitration using more or less the same word and subtle variations on it: ‘yata’. This prompted the young linguist-to-be David Peterson to ponder in what language Leia could say the same thing twice, yet the second time it had a different meaning. This was the starting point for the fascination that would ultimately lead him to the world of Game of Thrones, and the utterances of the Horse Lords of the Great Grass Sea.
But maybe–maybe–this double/triple meaning was the mark of a truly alien language? (Or maybe–maybe–this just wasn’t part of the Star Wars script that had received a great deal of attention, and Leia was therefore tasked with talking gibberish to humans and aliens…?)
Whatever the truth, Leia’s alien bounty hunter routine reflects on an interesting and crucial problem relating to our understanding–or incomprehension–of a language. If you turn on your TV right now and hear a character on a show speak only a short line or two of strange dialogue, is there a way for you to tell what the language is? It could be a created language, like Klingon or Dothraki; it could be a natural language that exists and is spoken natively in our world that you don’t know and haven’t heard before; or it could be utter, utter gobbledygook. There really isn’t any clear or easy or scientific way to tell.
We humans have evolved all kinds of sophisticated ways to use or misuse, illuminate and obfuscate in the tongue we have mastered, but we are completely clueless when faced with languages we don’t know. Take, for example, the story of the silent illusionist Chung Ling Soo–‘the marvellous Chinese conjuror’–considered the world’s greatest magician, at the beginning of the 20th century. A man who pioneered new ideas in magic, inspiring friends like Harry Houdini.
Soo’s most notorious and dangerous illusion was the dramatic Bullet-catching trick. ‘Defying the Bullets’ involved catching two bullets in his teeth. Not surprisingly, given the risk involved, he performed it very rarely. The bullets were selected in full view of everyone, marked by the audience, then loaded into the muzzle of a gun and fired directly at the conjuror. In 1918, while performing ‘Defying the Bullets’ before an audience at the Wood Green Empire in north London, Soo spoke his first–and last–ever words on stage. The shots were fired as usual, but then, twisting his robed body awkwardly and sending the porcelain ‘catch’ plate smashing to the ground, the conjuror exclaimed, in perfect English, ‘Oh My God. Something’s happened. Lower the curtain.’
This exclamation from the previously silent performer was extraordinary for a number of reasons. The first was that Chung Ling Soo was actually William Robinson, an American of Scottish descent who neither spoke Chinese nor had any Chinese heritage. As Jim Steinmeyer describes in his biography of the magician The Glorious Deception, in order to maintain the illusion that came with his increasing success and fame, Soo developed a surreally complex method of hiding his identity behind unknown languages. He employed his Japanese friend Fukado ‘Frank’ Kametaro, who was a fluent English speaker, to act as his assistant and translator, when necessary for publicity reasons. When Robinson was required to ‘speak’ to the press, the reporters would ask questions in English, understood by both Kametaro and Soo. Kametaro would ‘translate’ the question into his improvised Chinese (he didn’t speak it either) and then Soo would reply in his own, extemporised version of Chinese. Kametaro would acknowledge this and reply in English on Soo’s behalf. So, two men who both spoke and understood English were creating two separately fake versions of a language neither knew in the slightest. You do have to wonder if they both always kept a straight face.
Extraordinarily, everyone was fooled. The illusion of fluency worked so well, of course, since the magician’s company never appear to have encountered any Chinese-speaking reporters. A trick like that wouldn’t work nowadays. Even in the pre-internet days, if you spotted a mistaken, phoney, or poorly-devised language you could only tell your friends about it–and they might or might not be interested. But nowadays, as soon as an episode of a TV show is broadcast, or a film is released, fans can rush online to admire and pick apart every nuance of the production–including the languages of the fictional world.
Constructed Languages
V Real-World Languages
Some experts believe that as many as 12,000 languages were spoken around the world. Approximately 6,000 languages remain today, but by the end of this century, the consensus is that the number of languages in use will be much smaller than it is now. Some linguists reckon that in 100 years’ time, 90% of the world’s languages will be gone. And perhaps three dominant tongues–Mandarin, English, Spanish?–will rule the globe.
Meanwhile, in our mind-boggling era of globalisation and cultural exchange, constructed languages like Dothraki are created and learned within a few years, while real-world languages which evolved over millennia are dying out. And while many of us have names with meanings in languages ancient or modern that we don’t speak ourselves, in future it may become commonplace to give children names that have meanings to select groups of people, or even just to the parents themselves, in a language they’ve lovingly created, along with their child.
Where could all this end? Could the number of created languages one day overtake the number of natural languages in our world? It’s an intriguing possibility. (But, as the Dothraki don’t say, it isn’t known…) And what status do languages created for other worlds have in ours? In April 2016, the Guardian reported that a lawsuit currently before the US federal courts was dealing with this very question–disputing the use of the Klingon language in a new unauthorised crowd-funded Star Trek film. According to the Guardian, Paramount’s attorney, David Grossman, argued it was ‘absurd’ to say that Klingon exists as an independent language. The Language Creation Society, on the other hand, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the fan-made film, backing up their attorney’s assertion that ‘the [Klingon] language has taken on a life of its own’.
By contrast, the Dothraki language has a website providing a fairly comprehensive dictionary for fans, with over 3,000 words (many of which have never been heard in the show, and maybe never will be). Thus Dothraki is gradually becoming a living, breathing language with a life of its own. It’s even featured in the US version of The Office. And when the storyline on that show required some Dothraki words that hadn’t featured in Game of Thrones, David Peterson was all too ready to help out. As the linguist explained on his blog, the show involved one of the characters, Dwight, conjugating a noun–verb compound to do with throat-ripping. Foth aggendak–I throat-rip; foth aggendi–you throat-rip–you get the idea. Noun–verb compounds hadn’t been called upon thus far in either George RR Martin’s novels or the TV show, but hey, Peterson liked what the The Office had done in the way of noun incorporation. So he decided to canonise this linguistic innovation and henceforth this type of Dothraki noun–verb compound is known to language-learners in our world as a Schrutean compound, in honour of The Office’s Dwight Schrute. The mind- and world-bending possibilities of a constructed language!
Peterson has also taken a rather personal and romantic approach to the tongue of the war-like horse warriors. In any language he creates, he always includes his wife’s name–Erin. For a less sweet-natured language creator, this raises the possibility for some interesting score-settling. But Peterson has ‘Erin’ translated as ‘good’ or ‘kind’ in Dothraki. Aww! He also included his much-loved sadly deceased cat’s name, ‘Okeo’ to mean ‘friend’. Pass me my ‘arakh’ [fierce sword-y thing], I think there’s something in my ‘tih’ [eye]…
‘It’s in the Trees, It’s Coming!’
Back in the 1980s, Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, announced that he talked and listened to the plants and trees in his garden. Understandably, this delighted the world’s press, and their happiness only grew, as in subsequent interviews Charles continued to fertilise the notion of this rather literal Gardeners’ Question Time. ‘I got a lot of flack for a lot of things. I mean potty this and potty that, loony this and loony that,’ he told the BBC. Quite.
Another heir to a great kingdom, Bran Stark faces an arguably parallel dilemma as he too can commune with trees, and this is vital as he is a ‘greenseer’–someone who can experience visions of the past and future of his world by connecting to a natural network of living plants.
Bran’s guide and mentor, Bloodraven, helps him to master his supernatural powers. When we first meet Bloodraven he’s seated on an eerie weirwood throne, a tangled nest of roots that almost seems at one with his withered limbs. In the world of Game of Thrones, anyone who actually has a throne commands our attention, yet Bloodraven’s seat couldn’t be further from the much-desired Iron Throne, made by the first Targaryen king out of the beaten and misshapen swords of his enemies, and smelted together with the fire of dragons. (It is extremely uncomfortable to sit on, by all accounts.)
Bloodraven sits dreaming upon his woven throne of weirwood, which has become a part of him, encircling him like a nest, embracing him like a mother. This natural and gentle nexus of power is the antithesis of the one above ground in Westoros. Yet what is Bloodraven’s kingdom of trees actually like? Is it as weir[d] and spooky as we suppose? And in our world, what could a kingdom of trees actually achieve?
The old gods of Westeros and the Children of the Forest use a network of ancient trees to send and receive information across the Seven Kingdoms. Some of these trees literally have eyes; they have faces carved into them and are known as ‘heart trees’. They seem generally benign, but from the start some readers and viewers have wondered about the motivations of the woods. Do they have Bran’s best interests at heart?
A sentient tree manipulating a creature for its own ends is certainly something the acacia-tree dwelling ants of South America are familiar with. As the name suggests, these ants live and die entirely on the acacia tree and dutifully protect it from weeds and also attacks from other insects and even hungry goats. In return, the tree provides the ants with food and a place to live. So far, so wood. A classic ‘symbiotic’ relationship, biologists would say, that benefits both parties as they work together.
But recently, scientists studying the relationship discovered the acacia has a cunning plan to make sure this little arrangement never comes to an end–that the trees and the ants work, rest and play together for ever and ever. In order to make sure the ants continue to see the good for the trees, the acacia produces a highly addictive, sugary sap, which not only tastes good to the ants but also contains an enzyme that physically alters them so as to ensure they can never digest any other type of sugary sap from any of the other trees ever again. From their first hit of its sap, these ants are addicts who can never get clean, even if they want to. (We have the basis for a future dystopian novel about fast food mega corps right here…)
German plant-biologist Dr Martin Heil has studied the relationship between the ants and the trees. ‘It was surprising to me that the immobile, “passive” plant can manipulate the seemingly much more active partner, the ant,’ he says, in an article for National Geographic.
An eco-system that is self-aware? So far, so Avatar. But just as the weirwoods of Westeros communicate with each other and send information across many miles, so the trees in our world have fast and efficient ways of reaching out and ‘talking’ to each other. They just possibly don’t discuss the politics of the Seven Kingdoms when they hook up.
A complex and extensive underground network of fungi connects trees and plants, enabling them to share information and help their neighbours, across many miles. Fungus expert Paul Stamets called these fungal networks ‘Earth’s natural internet’ in a 2008 TED talk. Logging on to the ‘wood wide web’, there appears to be a constant ‘back and forth’ between the trees. They send each other nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen when needed. Old trees that seem to know they are dying will send packets of their own nutrients out to young trees that are just establishing themselves, to help them get started in life. The interconnectedness of forests and woodlands is such that some scientists think we shouldn’t think of them as separate trees and plants at all, but as a single, sentient living organism.
OK, so trees help each other out with the basics of life, but weirwood trees that warn of dangers–that’s still fantasy, right? Well, maybe not.
Scientists studying tomato plants have discovered that communications on the wood wide web can be more sophisticated than just an exchange of resources. These plants warn each other of incoming pests; when they have succumbed to pesky aphids they tell others to beware, and the plants receiving the message beef up their immune systems accordingly to avoid harm. Almost like those helpful friends who forward you an email saying ‘Do not fall for this scam. He is not really a deposed prince trying to regain his country, but a guy who works in a mobile phone shop in New Jersey.’
We’ll have to wait and see what happens with Bran and Bloodraven and indeed Prince Charles as they explore their unique relationships with plants. But can trees communicate valuable and complex information to each other? Yew better believe it…