How do people make up languages for films/books? Do they go through a dictionary word by word and make up a translation for each one? Or is it more of a pig-Latin type process?
In: Culture
It depends, really. In case of A Song of Ice and Fire, GRRM didn’t really invent any language. He just wrote what they were saying in English, and said ‘this is in Dothraki/Valyrian/…’. Or described how the language sounds like to someone that doesn’t know it. For the show, they did invent these languages, because there it’s harder to do this type of thing.
That being said, GRRM did make up a few words or phrases in his new languages.
On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got Tolkien who (and correct me if I’m wrong here, I’m sure there are enough LotR nerds around) made the languages first, specifically Elvish if memory serves me. And from there, he went on to write his books.
So, it’s a spectrum. When writing for a book, you can go from anywhere between Martin’s way of describing the language, to Tolkien’s way of actually inventing a new one.
And even if you do invent a new one, you can also go far. Do they use the Latin alphabet, or a custom one? Is it just some transliterations (ie: a us this rune, b is that rune etc and words are just English words, in this new alphabet), or are the words different as well? How does grammar and syntax work? Is it like English: subject verb object; or like Latin where word order doesn’t matter that much? Are there grammatical cases, or not?
If you’re really interested, you can head over to /r/conlangs, a subreddit for constructed languages.
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