HELEN BARROW: If you want me to do a quick demo, I will give you three words then, totally without context. Okay? [She mouths three words.]
HZ: Well, it looked like you were saying, “baa, baa, baa,” but that, I assume, is not what you were saying.
HELEN BARROW: That wasn't what I was saying, no.
HZ: What were you saying?
HELEN BARROW: So you've got the right one in that you've got the B. Yeah? So one of them was a B. So if I give you some context then, if I tell you one was a furry animal, one can be a civic leader, and one can be a piece of fruit. Okay, right, I'll do it again. [She mouths the same three words again.]
HZ: …I'm bad at this.
HELEN BARROW: But the thing is, I have deliberately picked three words that I know look alike, because, to go into the technical side of it, consonant confusion group, you know, a set of lip shapes that look alike.
Allusionist 95. Verisimilitude - transcript
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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