welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m
jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the language of nobles, poetry,
and dragons, High Valyrian.
this is the first episode in the fourth season of Conlang Critic, my series about analyzing
the design of different constructed languages. I don’t know if you already knew that, and
it’s kinda weird not knowing if you knew that. this show used to be like, my main thing.
I think it still says that it’s the main focus of the channel in my channel description.
but like, measurably, that is no longer the main thing people are subscribed to my channel
for.
that said, hi everyone! Conlang Critic is back! I know none of you watched the video
announcing what would be coming in Season Four, but yeah, I’m doing a video about
High Valyrian, and you’re watching it now!
High Valyrian is a fictional language created by David J. Peterson for the HBO series Game
of Thrones, a series that you definitely already know about. this is the second Game of Thrones
language I’ve discussed on this show, and as such the background details of how High
Valyrian was created are familiar territory.
much like Dothraki, an early version of High Valyrian appeared in George R.R. Martin’s
book series A Song of Ice and Fire, in the form of some character names and a few fragments
of text, with the language first appearing in the second book in the series, published
in 1998. and, also like Dothraki, when HBO adapted the series into Game of Thrones, DJP
was brought on to expand High Valyrian into a full language, first appearing in the show’s
third season, which aired in 2013.
today, High Valyrian is one of the very few relatively well-known conlangs, thanks to
its association with and prominent role in Game of Thrones. in 2019, a course for High
Valyrian was launched for the popular language learning app Duolingo, and at the time of
writing it’s one of only two constructed languages on the app, the other being Esperanto.
though, there is one for Klingon that’s been in the works for a good few years now.
in fiction, High Valyrian is the ancestor of the Valyrian languages, a family of languages
spoken throughout the continent of Essos. High Valyrian specifically is used as a literary
language. it’s essentially Game of Thrones’s version of the “fantasy Latin” concept.
the main source I used for this video is the Language Invention wiki, which is a disparagingly
good resource for information about DJP’s languages. High Valyrian is super well documented
on there.
High Valyrian’s consonants are:
/m n ɲ/ /p t k q/
/b d ɡ/ /s h/
/v z dʒ ʁ/ /l ʎ/
/r̥/ /r/
hey, is this segment actually useful? it’s been a part of this show for so long I’ve
never really thought to question it, but like. do people get something out of hearing me
read through all the consonant phonemes that they wouldn’t have gotten from just showing
the chart? I don’t know, let me know what you think. it’s a new season! perfect time
to start shaking up the format.
anyway, right, I skipped some stuff here for the sake of the chart looking nice, but there’s
a bunch of allophony and marginal phonemes and stuff.
see, like that. there’s a dental fricative /θ/ and a velar fricative /x/ that both only
appear in loanwords, and that palatal phoneme there is usually pronounced like [dʒ], but
has other allophones that appear to be in free variation.
gonna be honest here, I don’t really know what there is to say about this inventory.
this is a pretty standard fantasy language consonant inventory. there’s what, the uvular
stop? the voiceless trill? the consonants that are kinda between being fricatives and
approximants? I guess those things are kinda interesting, and I don’t really have anything
bad to say about anything here, it’s just that it feels like I’ve seen all of this
before. nothing here is all that new or exciting to me.
and that’s not really High Valyrian’s fault, I don’t think. like, there’s nothing
wrong with this consonant inventory. I’ve just been doing this show for almost five
years, and I think I’m running out of interesting things to say about consonant inventories
like this.
is this burnout? is this that famous youtuber burnout everyone talks about? I like making
stuff, my other projects I’ve finished recently were very fulfilling, and I definitely still
like conlangs. and I don’t think I care that much about engagement. I mean, you’ve
seen my channel, you know what sort of things I make on here, obviously I don’t care about
alienating my established audience.
sorry, I don’t want to make this about myself. you’re here for High Valyrian, right? I
mean, so many people requested a video about this language, clearly that’s what people
want to see. so like, I gotta! I mean, I told everyone that I would in that video none of
you watched.
okay, sorry, High Valyrian’s vowels are, these ones.
each of these six vowels- uh, yeah. just showing the chart on screen, and not reading them.
yeah, I don’t know, it feels weird. I don’t really know if I like it, but I, I can’t
keep doing the same thing forever.
sorry. each of these six vowels has phonemic length, so there’s a long and short version
of,
is this. is this a review? I’m just describing things, I’m not even doing analysis. you
could get all of this information from the wiki I cited at the start, it’s linked in
the description. look, there’s literally this exact chart. what useful commentary could
I add here? “yup, this is a pretty normal six vowel system with phonemic length. you’ve
seen this sort of thing before, I’ve seen it before. here it is again, but in a language
everyone already knows about and likes.”
I could like, add in more educational stuff explaining everything specifically for people
who don’t already know stuff about conlangs, make the video twice as long like I did with
the Lingwa de Planeta video, but that would risk feeling condescending to people who do
already know all of this stuff.
I could try to go out of my way to find things to criticize, but like, it’s fine? none
of this is bad, I don’t think it’s even accurate to call it boring. I think, what
the problem is. is that it doesn’t actually make sense to always start with a long section
about phonology? like, okay, for languages that are aiming for a specific goal it makes
sense, there’s stuff from natural languages to compare them to, I can figure out how well
they meet their goals, but for a fictional language like this it’s just. I’m just
reading a wiki page.
here’s a table of diphthongs, because on the wiki that’s what comes next.
you actually get more information from the wiki’s version of this chart than you get
from mine, because I simplify charts like these to make them easier to read, and so
I can then read through those extra details here while the chart is on screen to give
the illusion that I have something interesting to say about it. like the monophthongs, these
diphthongs can all be either long or short. the top-row diphthongs are falling diphthongs
whereas the other ones are all rising diphthongs. cool. good use of a paragraph.
there’s also some info here about the way stress works, which I don’t have anything
to say about apart from just relaying that information here and saying “this was well
thought out”.
in-universe, High Valyrian is a literary language. a bookish tongue, if you will. in the books,
it’s described as, having a writing system. this writing system was never created. in
the show, it just uses the Latin alphabet.
I mean, I get it. the written form of the language doesn’t exactly feature prominently
in the show, not nearly as much as the spoken form, and it would be a lot of work for something
that doesn’t really matter to the show, at least not from the showrunners’ perspective.
but you know, it still would’ve been nice if one had been made. there’s this quote
from DJP about his idea of what the writing system might have been like, and his idea
is that it would be like a hybrid alphabet-logography inspired by the way Egyptian Hieroglyphs worked,
and like, that’s a cool idea! it would be cool to have seen that.
so, as it stands, what we have is a Romanization system that Romanizes a native writing system
that we know next to nothing about. just like Dothraki, this Romanized form of the language
is what came first, and DJP reverse engineered the rest of the language from it. and like,
yup, it’s definitely a functional Romanization system. everything is what it makes sense
for it to be, I don’t think there’s anything it would make sense to change. it doesn’t
make sense for this to be the way it’s written in-universe, but it also doesn’t make sense
for everyone to be speaking English all the time. it’s fine.
cool, there you go, officially out of things to say about the orthography. what’s the
point of this even being its own section? this format is so limiting.
it’s weird, right, because I definitely haven’t lost interest in conlangs. I actually
have been enjoying reading through this wiki about this language. it’s well put together,
a lot of care was put into it. DJP is good at what he does. it’s just like, what can
I add to this? why is this a video that people want me to make?
I don’t have any formal linguistics education. I haven’t made a real conlang before. I
haven’t even watched Game of Thrones! like, seriously, what am I doing? why am I making
this video? why did I decide to commit to making a video about whatever language the
most people asked for? nothing else I do is like that. the thing people like about my
channel is how I just make videos about whatever topic I care about. why did so many of you
think this would be a good video?
I’m sorry, I’m doing it again. please, don’t worry about me, I’m fine. I’m
only putting all my meta thoughts about this show in here because I genuinely don’t have
enough to say about High Valyrian to fill a whole video. and like, if you saw that thing
I posted everywhere while I was writing this you already know what the conclusion to this
line of reasoning ended up being. oh also, just in general you shouldn’t assume that
you know who I am or how I’m feeling from watching my videos. that’s a pretty unhealthy
way to consume media.
anyway, right, grammar. High Valyrian is a very inflectional language. a clear example
of this is the way noun declension works. nouns in High Valyrian have eight cases and
four numbers, and the way the two features are declined depends on which of six declension
groups a noun belongs to. at an abstract level, this is somewhat similar to the way nouns
work in the European classical languages that High Valyrian is supposed to be a fantasy
analogue to.
now, I say six declension groups, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. like, the
three example words shown here are all first-declension nouns, but the different shapes of their lemma
forms make the surface realizations of these suffixes different, and all of the other declension
types have similar amounts of variation.
there is a lot of stuff you have to keep track of for noun declensions, which I think is
fitting for a language that’s supposed to be kinda like Latin. the four-way number distinction
adds to the familiar “singular” and “plural” numbers a “paucal”, used for when there’s
“some” or “a few” of a thing, and “collective”, used when talking about
“all” of something.
the set of cases here is, I think, well selected. I like the use of the comitative and instrumental,
which correspond to “with” (as in “alongside”) and “with” (as in “using”).
I think the most interesting feature of High Valyrian grammar is its grammatical gender
system. when most people think about grammatical gender, they’re thinking about how it works
in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages that have grammatical gender, where some nouns
are “feminine” and others are “masculine”, and sometimes there might be some nouns that
are “neuter”.
however, grammatical gender doesn’t have to have anything to do with gender gender,
as I talked about in my video about Lingwa de Planeta, and the way gender works in High
Valyrian is a great example of that. High Valyrian has four genders: lunar, solar, terrestrial,
and aquatic.
this is a very fun set of categories. it’s not quite as complex as how gender works in,
say, the Bantu languages, but it’s also a bit more complex than the more standard
animate / inanimate or common / neuter gender systems.
adjectives are more regular than nouns, and they agree with nouns in case, number, and
gender.
adjectives usually go after nouns, but sometimes they go before nouns instead, and there’s
alternate forms of these suffixes used in that context.
there’s also another, simpler set of suffixes used for when the stem of the adjective ends
with one of a few specific consonants, which also have alternate forms for when the adjective
goes before a noun.
okay, I’m back to just reading stuff from the wiki now. there’s a whole bunch of charts
like this on the wiki for everything. I’m not actually motivated at all to now go and
rework any of like, the verb conjugation tables into my normal chart style. I think you get
it at this point, it’s all very intricate and we’re still only talking about morphology
here.
verbs in High Valyrian are just really complicated in general, and explaining how they work would
basically involve a whole lecture about tense, aspect, and mood. the amount of work put into
it is very impressive, and I think the end result is pretty cool.
I think what’s most impressive is how all of this morphology came about from DJP reverse
engineering the very small set of examples of the language in the original books. the
books contain only two complete sentences in High Valyrian.
there’s a nice long quote from DJP on the entry for the word “valar” on the wiki
that explains his exact thought process turning this pair of sentences into the extensive
morphology and grammar in the final language. quote,
“I wanted to create something that was evocative of Latin or Greek in precisely the way that
an American who hasn’t studied them very much might imagine them. Even if one doesn’t
know the word “case” or “aspect’, the thing one notices are the -um, -us, -os,
-ion, -ae, etc. endings. If you look at the various High Valyrian names from the books,
it’s clear those endings are part of what struck Martin as well. I wanted to create
a system that supported those endings.
In the two canon sentences, we’re dealing with the nominative, so the cases aren't going
to show up, but it gave me the opportunity to instantiate a new paradigm. The fact that
we had “all men” here screamed collective, but we also had a number of names that ended
in -ar, and that gave me an idea. The names would likely be singular, not collective,
but what if there was a connection? If I wanted to make valar the product of inflection, it
would have a number system that would at least be singular, plural, and collective.
This is how the number system of Valyrian was born. This also, though, suggested a gender
system. Because if the singular of valar was going to be vala, it suggested a connection
between whatever mass nouns gave birth to Rhaegar and the lot and their count versions,
which would terminate in -a. Add to that the many o themed names, and I came up with a
new cross section: mass vs. count and theme A vs. theme B (these latter being vocalic
themes that are more or less arbitrary). Combining those, I came up with four genders.
All in all, despite the fact that there were only two full sentences of High Valyrian containing
a total of three words, I was able to get a lot of mileage out of them. Even if this
may not have been what George R. R. Martin planned or envisioned, I think it works pretty
well. Also, given how daunting it felt to try to learn Latin way back when, I felt pretty
good about coming up with something that could sit next to Latin at the kids table at Thanksgiving
if all the seats at the main table were taken.”
speaking of the way David J. Peterson reverse engineered the very small corpus of original
text into a full language, the vocabulary in High Valyrian is where a lot of that stuff
is most apparent.
outside of those two sentences, exactly two other High Valyrian words are given English
translations in the books.
of these five words, two of them have less than subtle Latin influences. that word for
“dragonfire”, dracarys, sounds a whole lot like the Latin word for “dragon”,
draco, and the word for “must die”, morghulis, also happens to sound a lot like the Latin
word for “death”, mors. as DJP put it, this is, quote, “either a one in a trillion
coincidence or very lazy”.
outside of George R.R.’s handful of words, the rest of the vocabulary was created by
DJP. a lot of the charm present in Dothraki’s vocabulary is also present here. DJP is good
at this stuff. as I mentioned in the Dothraki episode, I like the way David sometimes uses
vocabulary to pay homage to various people or things. it’s always really fun.
there’s stuff like how the word for “wise” is named after Sylvia Sotomayor, the creator
of the language Kēlen, the word for “daughter” is named after David’s sister Natalie, the
word for “crow” is named after someone who won a contest after the release of The
Art of Language Invention, the word for “son” is named after DJP’s 3000th follower on
twitter, the word for “chain” is named after Simon Belmont from Castlevania, the
word for “pear tree” is named after Melllvar from Futurama, the word for “stuck” is
named after the Suez Canal, and so on and so on.
there’s a lot of this stuff, and it’s all very fun. and like, it’s done in a way
where you don’t really notice until it’s been pointed out, like all of these words
fit right in with the more straightforward ones.
other than that, I uh, legitimately don’t know what else to say about the vocabulary.
I could just list more things, I guess, but I don’t really want to do that. uh, there’s
this chart I found on the Game of Thrones Wiki that shows a bunch of different kinship
terms? I could probably get another couple minutes of content out of that. I seriously
run into this problem like every single time, I never know what to do with the “vocabulary”
section. maybe this, shouldn’t be its own section every time either.
now, okay, I know I said I probably wouldn’t do the spoken sample like this again after
the Dothraki episode. but like, you know, I feel like using an actual clip from the
show still makes more sense than me reading through it myself.
so uh, the following sample is from Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 4, “And Now His
Watch Is Ended”, released on April 21st, 2013. the scene features dialogue in both
High Valyrian and the related language Astapori Valyrian. let’s take a listen.
DAENERYS: Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor.
KRAZNYS: Ydra ji Valyre?
DAENERYS: Nyke Daenerys Jelmāzmo hen Targārio Lentrot, hen Valyrio Uēpo ānogār iksan.
Valyrio muño ēngos ñuhys issa.
all in all, I guess. I mean, I haven’t really said anything meaningful about this language,
have I? like, should I now, after having described what the language literally is, vaguely say
“yeah I like it”? I mean, that’s what I usually do for a positive review of a fictional
language. I mean, does this section even hold any value to begin with?
what is Conlang Critic? I mean, what really is it? it’s nominally a review series, but
I don’t think any of the episodes that I’d describe as “good” Conlang Critic videos
actually count as reviews. what I think this show should be is one where I look at a conlang
and use it as a starting point to talk about different aspects of language design. and
like, ideally, I should know which ones before I make the video.
I think there are multiple fundamental aspects of this show that have made it actively worse
as a series about conlangs. one of those is the framing of these videos as reviews. like,
they’re not reviews. not anymore, at least.
the other aspect is the way I select what languages to cover based on how many people
asked for them. again, you might have already seen my statement about this, but I’m going
to stop taking requests. I’ll finish this season, do the rest of the episodes in the
small list that I already announced, but after that, what languages I discuss on this show
will be entirely decided by me. the response to this decision has been very understanding,
and I’m grateful for that. this show definitely isn’t going anywhere, but after this season
is over, it’s going to be more in line with the rest of what I make, where new episodes
only come out when there’s a topic I actually want to discuss.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Blissymbolics.