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The Allusionist

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A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

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The Allusionist

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Allusionist 95. Verisimilitude - transcript

March 6, 2019 The Allusionist
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HZ: Approximately how many languages have you invented at this point?
DAVID PETERSON: I think I've invented over 50 languages at this point. Not all of them are very large in terms of vocabulary size, and not all of them are very good. I had created about 17 before I ever started working on Game of Thrones.

HZ: The languages you hear in Game of Thrones: Dothraki -

[CLIP] Khal Drogo: “Moon of my life, are you hurt?”

HZ - the various dialects of Valyrian:

CLIP: Daenerys: “Valyrian is my mother tongue.”

HZ: - those aren’t the actors making up some gibberish. Those are functional languages, with large vocabularies and complex grammars and etymologies.

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In transcript Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, Helen Zaltzman, etymology, lexicography, Dothraki, Valyrian, Game of Thrones, George RR Martin, HBO, TV, television, adaptations, books, novels, fiction, fantasy, movies, conlang, conlangers, constructed languages, language creation, neologisms, invented languages, created languages, sf, science fiction, Esperanto, David Peterson, grammar, a priori, a postieri, i-mutation, Old English, Anglo-Saxon, mouse, mice, mouses, vowels, vowel shift, phonology, spelling, morphology, pronunciation, natural languages, naturalistic, evolution, phonetics, phonemes, vocabulary, metaphors, idioms, irregularities, khaleesi, Emilia Clarke, actors, acting, translation, translating, verbs, nouns, plurals
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The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.