If you are a Game of Thrones fan, you might already know what I'm talking about...if not, let me clarify this: M'athchomaroon is the equivalent for "hello" in the fictional language of Dothraki. Dothraki was created specifically for Game of Thrones by this guy:
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| David J. Peterson |
David J. Peterson is a linguist who really likes to invent new languages - but not the kind of "oh, let's substitute each letter in the alphabet with a strange sign" kind of language most of us invented at some point when we were children. No, David puts a lot more effort into his work as you can best see on his homepage.
For each language, he explains all the rules from pronunciation to morphology to orthography for whoever has the will and nerve to read through it. Each language is more or less based on the grammar rules of a real language. For example, there is 'Kamakawi' (which means 'rainbow'), a language based on Hawai'ian. It is one of the more "evolved" languages on his homepage, and by evolved I mean that David provides more specific grammar rules and a larger vocabulary for Kamakawi than for some of the other languages. For example, he uploaded a list of Kamakawian names and their meaning!
Some other examples of languages David created are 'Gwedyr', a language based on the Finno-Ugric vowel harmony and noun cases, and KNSL, a sign language.
I think his work is pretty impressive, but it must also be quite sad to be the inventor of a language and therefore probably its only speaker. The meaning of language is to make communication easier, but if you cannot speak that language with anyone because nobody knows it, this is very frustrating. Also, if you are the creator of a language you know all its rules because you are the one who makes them. There is no one who knows the language better than you - so there is no one you can look up to and learn from.
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