Accent Expert Breaks Down 6 Fictional Languages From Film & TV | WIRED

foreigner Hi, I'm Eric, singer Eric is a dialect coach and a guy who really loves linguistics. Today we are going to talk about constructed

languages

. Conlangs are

languages

​​that have been created by a person rather than being a natural language that has evolved over time. Let's start with six great scammers Langs, the cinderin The Lord of the Rings from J.R.R Tolkien from the movie Avatar, of course, Klingon from Star Trek, pack tongue from Harry Potter and Dothraki in High Valyrian from Game of Thrones and if you stay, we'll get to other random things, part one, let's start with the parceled tongue, Harry Potter, so one of the interesting things about the parceled tongue, of course, is that snakes have a different anatomy than people, They don't have lips, so we don't hear sounds, uh. using the lips as if they don't have vocal cords, so everything is deaf and also because snakes hiss, many of the sounds are elongated, so we understand that that means leave it alone or leave because you know you are telling the snake to go away. wow and that last sound, which you may recognize in Arabic, which constricts what we call pharyngeal fricative, which is a fancy term for your throat, your pharynx is contracting a little bit, we have it in parcel language because snakes like to constrict their things, why do you talk plot? language, you heard me, one of the natural language inspirations for the parcellated language was the languages ​​of Niger Congo which have vowel pairs, one version of which has the tongue root pushed forward and another has the tongue root back and the vocal harmony has ended.

I spoke a different one. language Daniel Radcliffe en I don't know a 10-year-old who is doing quite well. I'm impressed but I didn't realize that conlang 2 Klingon from Star Trek so Klingon was invented by Mark Auckland hi my name is Mark to sound It doesn't look like any real human language of course it's human actors speaking it so which had to use sounds that exist in human languages, but have a really strange set of distributions. The three basic elements of a sentence are the subject and the verb. and the Klingon object has a really unusual word order.

A very small percentage of human languages ​​put the object of a sentence first, then the verb, then the subject, but mathematically there are six of these things, which is why the book gave I where we would say I gave it. the book or I gave him the book more or less like Yoda Brookshire, that's Yoda, obviously the Klingon was meant to sound a little harsh, guttural and warrior, it has a lot of sounds using the back of the vocal tract and the throat, things like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory does a pretty good version of this, actually,botash Biers, that sound is a very enthusiastic uvular affricate in the sentence, revenge is Edition, what happens to him or literally when revenge is served Cold, it's always very good, it means it's very good, then. that word you don't understand that tip of your tongue curled back sounds D so it should be like an Indian or South Asian language requires I think more consideration which is why English speaking actors who speak Klingon often don't really make that tip of your tongue curl back listen to this last word who that should be Claude sounds like it's worth it just no good you're in a normal kind of English duh Lord Lord guess who's this close to being true, I'll keep this short Frazier and that sound at the end is quite similar, it's not gibberish, it's Klingon, this is one of my favorite sounds, it's what's called a voiceless lateral alveolar African TL sound, but without any voice, so it's the sound that you can find. in Navajo and you can hear her say it twice here in Pokémon it means honor in Klingon, which is a very important word for Klingons, obviously, so she says that you and your people are in danger and it's like the sound of a sh in English, but again it's retroflex like that. the tip of the tongue is curved back, you can hear that sound in Russian Mandarin Chinese, it's a very popular sound in lags, it's quite familiar in Scots, it's also in Valerian, you can hear it in Dothraki, so Klingon It has a vocabulary of about 3,000 words, which is a lot, new ones keep being added because it's been around for a while, there are about a hundred fluent Klingon speakers and many more can speak a little in glass.

You can take tests and competency exams. You know that? there is a Klingon translation of Hamlet, that's the question Klingon has gotten better at over time in terms of actors getting the sounds right. Listen to this. I guess where Kiki is at the back of the mouth. It's called a uvular explosive. It is a sound that is completely natural. languages, although not in any European or Western languages, here is the same sound in Klingon, of course, this is a big world. The characters that speak High Valyrian come from different places and speak different dialects in High Valyrian proper, there is a vocal sound that you can listen to in this clip right here that is the same sound that you hear in French, it's basically an e sound with your lips forward curved e, so now you can make the difference in French between two and two, sometimes Malisandre pronounces the sound that's supposed to be that as a The sound with most of the actors on the show is made by most of the time, but of course they all speak different dialects in ancient High Valyrian.

My friends here have always been the ones who don't speak Cavalieri. Hello, Valerian is a bit like Estonian and something like Latin. because it's this ancient language in this world with Langford Dothraki Game of Thrones in that line that you're saying something like I'll give him a golden crown that men will tremble when they see it, you hear, that's that uvular place that means will tremble is the future tense of which is shiver some people think Dothraki sounds like Arabic their natural language influences are more Turkish here's Johnny American English has a really weird R sound, this ER thing you do when you clench your tongue, so it's a really strange sound, it hardly exists in any other language on Earth and it is a strange thing to do with the tongue, so it is often very difficult for children to acquire it, look, yes, it takes up to five years seriously, is difficult for non-native speakers, so it falls out of Langs' scam because it also sounds like American English.

A very popular approach is to have an R pressed like in an old British. Now is winter upon discontent, glorious summer lying here, you can hear it in High Valyrian. Klingon, interestingly enough, Valerian has the same contrast. Spanish makes two different R sounds that can change the meaning of a word, one is a tap and, but yes, there is a trill or a roll of R in a different word, just a different sound. Dothraki sometimes has a touch, sometimes a Trill, it doesn't really make a difference in the meaning of the word here, it's a Trill.

I used linguistic evolution as a characterization tool, basically to give an idea of ​​the history of the speakers, so Khal Drogo is a native Dothraki speaker and it sure seems like he is even though it's a made-up language which is Daenerys and here, in the first season, you can hear that she is not a native speaker later on, and this makes sense for the character, doesn't it? Not that the actress is getting better at it. they tell the story of the character becoming a more fluent Dothraki speaker. Listen to it here. The brilliant Gene Hayden Rouse, who is a friend and colleague, is the Game of Thrones dialect coach.

Yeah, that's me, so she does all the Dothraki and Valerian, that's right. and the actors do a very good job, well, they sure do. Jason Momoa's Dothraki sounds great, doesn't it? I mean you buy it completely as a native speaker and that's a credit to the actor, very nice of you, who doesn't actually speak any other language. languages ​​other than English and I guess now some Dothraki Dothraki, although much more developed in terms of vocabulary, you rip your fake throat again D is like 3,000 words, I think he, she, throat ribs, Valyrian has less than a thousand at the moment, but it is To grow to create authentic-sounding language, it is necessary to employ an authentic methodology.

Thanks conlang five, no Avi from the movie Avatar, foreign language created by linguist Paul Fromer and my life hasn't been the same since it was heavily inspired by Maori. and some Polynesian languages, especially when it comes to syllable structure, and you can hear that vowel consonant, vowel consonant, of course, a really obvious feature is those glottal stops, that's that sound that's like a little lump in the throat, we use it in English when we say Oh, sound, you can hear it a lot of times and it also has a class of really cool sounds called ejectors, which are sounds like the ones you're using in beat boxing, which are created by trapping air in the vocal track instead to exhale it. lungs The people at Sky have sent us a message, did you hear that word in the middle is an adjective?

Another place you actually hear adjectives is in English when you're a villain in a movie not a Jedi I'm smart and I'm willing for him to be My little secret, don't lie to me, conlang syndrin final or elvish from The Lord of the Rings . Modern or modern Elvish at the time of The Lord of the Rings. This is the grandfather of Khan Langs, the first Khan Lang created for a fantasy or science. fi story, okay, so we talked about what is called the Velar fricative, there is a very similar sound that is made a little bit forward in the mouth from there and you can hear this in German, you can't think of it as a sound in English , but say the word cute cute cute now say it again say it slow huge huge that sound just as you move away from the consonant which is the same sound and you can hear Arwen do it here so cinderen is one of the easiest Langs to actually pronounce it only consists of sounds that we find in English with the addition of and a tapped or a child Tolkien was a linguist uh we are philologists as they are called in those days and he invented these elvish languages, he was creating new languages ​​even when he was a little child.

He left a whole set of them, hundreds of fragments and notes, and they are older and are modern versions that have been compiled and analyzed by fans into what we believe he intended to be Cinderen. It combines influences from some of the languages ​​that Tolkien used. He knew and loved as a Finn. Also, the sound system comes from the Welsh Hepto and Winnipego and does some things that the Irish one does. Vigo Mortensen is an American actor but he speaks six languages. My own birthday. Yeah, I guess seven if you count the elvish one, it sounds. really good, i think it probably came very naturally to him, okay, that's the serious thing, but sometimes you don't need a whole system, you just need it to sound convincing, part two, other random stuff, iwakis from Return of the Jedi, okay , then you probably thought. this was made up gibberish and so was I, although it sounds cool, the sound designer of Return of the Jedi we had a huge amount of alien vocalizations and voices to create for this movie, we were actually inspired by a Mongolian language called a minority language, no very many speakers, but they liked the way it sounded and they basically took some words and phrases that don't mean what they wanted to say in that language and there's no real grammar here, but it's cool, so one of the things you need to A language is a variety of different possible sounds, otherwise there's not much you can say, so the walking carpet fluff ball here doesn't really seem to have a huge variety of different sounds to be able to make itself understood, which I thought it had emotional feelings associated with it.

I'm not. I'm exactly sure how we describe that in terms of the human vocal track, a uvular trill alone with a big open mouth, remember when we talked about snake anatomy? Droid anatomy is a similar challenge to inventing a language because you don't have a voice. tract at all, yes, but you can beep, okay, you call me that, the Divine language of the Fifth Element, you can hear that same type of syllable structure consonant vowel consonant vowel Polynesian, this is actually just gibberish, although I think They did work out what many of the words were supposed to mean but of course words alone don't make up a complete language so this isn't a real scam.

You said something I didn't understand, why I didn't understand anything, but Malkovich Malkovich from Being John. Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich well, we can't call this a conlag Milkovich, it only has one word, it has a kind of narration effect and a kind of intensification of this surreal meta glitch, some morkspeak from Mork and Mindy Daddy, this is more, no, no. no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you hear how he lifts and moves that vowel right before the end, like no, that's something American English does. It has a name, it's called prenasal tension, maybe if it were a foreign language.

It could be more like nanu or nanu no, no, no, no, I don't know, your voice is not right, Groot is talking about Guardians of the Galaxy, so all he says is that I'm Groot,so what is true, but Rocket seems to be able to understand it? so there must be more information there, you said it probably has something to do with inflection, music of speech, maybe it's a tone language like Mandarin Chinese, Furby toy revamp, do you speak Furbish, Lola, time of the party, okay, then I won't do it? I know it's a word, but it has the same type of syllable structure as Japanese: consonant vowel consonant vowel heptapod movie arrival language, so there's not much to say linguistically about those speech sounds because they're not sounds. of speech, is a kind of The heptopod spoken or audibly transmitted language is a language that has a completely different conception of time and heptopods seem to have a completely different experience of time than humans.

The past, present and future are all concurrent. They are not sequential, they are circular, which is why their writing has a circular format. They have to be able to express concepts when they speak, they speak like everyone else at the same time. Linguists call this non-linear spelling, so this is what the sound designer came up with to represent that, of course, I can't comment. I'm not some heptopod conclusion that creates an entire language from scratch in a way that mimics a natural language, which is a complete system of sounds, grammar, syntax, and all that. but it also has the inconsistencies and strangeness that natural languages ​​have, it is an extraordinary task and the amount of work required is simply mind-blowing, so to all the creators of these languages ​​that were created just to enrich our entertainment and storytelling experience of stories, thank you.

You, that's an amazing ending.