The involvement of television shows and movies is nothing new at colleges, but the creativity and types of classes revolving around shows has certainly evolved over the years. It’s gotten to the point where classes are now teaching made up languages. Yes, it’s true. The latest college course covering Game of Thrones is going to explore Dothraki. According to The Wrap:
Dothraki, the made-up language from “Game of Thrones,” is the latest fake language to capture the curiosity of fans, as evidenced by a new course at UC Berkeley. “The Linguistics of ‘Game of Thrones’ and the Art of Language Invention,” will be taught for six weeks over the summer by language creator David J. Peterson. UC Berkeley announced the class on its website last week.
Peterson is a UC Berkeley alum and says his love of creating languages dates back to his very first linguistics class at the school. He earned his Masters in Linguistics at UC San Diego in 2005 and just four years after that, was creating the Dothraki language based on snippets from George R.R. Martin’s books.
“From there, I’ve worked on about a dozen other shows and movies,” he told Berkeley. “Language has become my entire life and my livelihood.”
In addition to Peterson’s invention of Dothraki he also invented GOT’s High Valyrian language. Amazingly this isn’t the first time Peterson’s taught Dothraki. In 2014 Peterson contributed to a course called “Living Language Dothraki: A Conversational Language Course Based on the Hit Original HBO Series Game of Thrones.”
“There’s precisely as much value in creating a new language as there is in creating a new fictional story,” Peterson explained. “If you see no value in something like ‘As I Lay Dying’ or ‘To the Lighthouse,’ then I probably can’t convince you there’s value in creating a new language.”
I can’t say I’m going to be signing up for this class but I will say it definitely sounds interesting. Hopefully we can get some entertaining videos out of it.
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