David J. Peterson .co

Kisha ray essash!

For those who were able to watch the season 2 premiere of Game of Thrones, I hope you enjoyed it! (And for those who have yet to watch it in their home markets, I hope you enjoy it!) I saw the first episode about a week ago, and everyone there (myself included) was mightily impressed.

In fact, I think it’s worthwhile to meditate on that experience a little bit. For each of the first two seasons, HBO had this premiere event for cast and crew and their +1′s, and the events were pretty much the same in structure, but the atmosphere was quite different. The first time around, of course, George R. R. Martin was there, which was awesome, but overall, there were fewer people in attendance. The crew, of course, knew the show, but outside of that, I got the impression that a lot of folks there didn’t know what the books were all about, and didn’t know what to expect. They were there to support their friends and families, and to get a glimpse of a new show.

For the second premiere event, the place was packed. Not only that, but you could tell that everyone there was a fan of the show. We were allowed to invite one person, and I’m sure the first time around, guests were probably like, “Well, I’m not doing anything else, so that could be neat. Sure, I’ll come.” This time they were fighting over who would get to go. Plus, everyone knew every character, and knew all the ins and outs of the first season, and reacted appropriately to the action on screen. It was like going to a midnight showing for a blockbuster movie—not with Hollywood types, but with actual fans. That was really cool.

Back to the show, I love how the first thing we see is Peter Dinklage’s name—and his entrance is wonderful (as is his quip about Cersei’s cheekbones [which is true!]). Before his return, though, I wonder: Did anyone else think of the pit stage on Mortal Kombat seeing the Hound topple Ser Red Shirt over the edge? Because that’s the very first thing I thought of.

Other favorite bits of mine: The scene where Maester Cressen attempts to poison Melisandre; Cersei playing Simon Says with her guards at Littlefinger’s expense (“Power is power.” Ha!); Grey Wind menacing Jaime; and, of course, Joffrey getting slapped.

But, of course, we’re here to talk Dothraki, so talk it we shall!

First, a new character is introduced: Kovarro. As mentioned before, this was a name that the writers came up with (or perhaps Bryan Cogman specifically…?) based on the information I included about how to come up with Dothraki names (which, by the way, is a post that’s seriously overdue. Remind me if I forget). Dothraki makes a distinction between single and double consonants (e.g. ige “bowl (accusative)” vs. igge “bucket”), but I decided very early on that this wouldn’t necessarily be the case with names. Instead, consonant doubling is stylistic. It can also be functional, because a trisyllabic name like Hadoro would be stressed on the first syllable, even though the word hador, “gust of wind”, is stressed on the last. By doubling the last consonant, we get Hadorro, which keeps the stress on the same vowel as the original word, making the tie between the name and word more recognizable.

Our new name Kovarro, then, derives from the verb kovarat, which means “to stand”. Kovarro, then, is kind of like “stander (who is male)”: a tough guy who stands his ground. Of course, the name always reminds me of the wedding episode of Home Movies, which features one of Brendan’s films Landstander, with the main character, Landstander, whose key ability is that he can “stand on the land”.

Oh, and, of course, we also see Bitey! (I’ve named the little shoulder-standing dragon “Bitey”. Seems appropriate.) That’s really exciting. Can’t wait to see more dragons!

Back to Dothraki, we find Dany and Jorah et al. wandering the Athasar Virzeth, the Red Wastes, looking mighty dusty and bedraggled. And then, sadly, we lose another horse: Dany’s present from Drogo, her silver. To honor the poor horse’s memory, here’s a line from season 1 that never saw the light of day, but which readers of the book will remember:

• Vizhadi vizhadaan norethi shafkoa. “Silver for the silver of your hair.”

This is what Drogo says to Dany on giving her his present. In the show, Drogo ends up not really saying anything to Dany until, like, episode 3, so, naturally, this line had to be cut—and, quite frankly, it’s a good thing it was, because in the original script I sent, I made a mistake: I wrote shafki when I should have written shafkoa. Oops! I was still a beginner when it came to Dothraki grammar at that point, though, so I hope the gaffe can be overlooked.

As things become more desperate, Dany gathers her bloodriders together (Zhey Rakharo, zhey Aggo, zhey Kovarro), and says the following:

• Fichi hrazef zinayi kishi. “Take our remaining horses.”

A short bit, but we see a couple of rare things in here. First, if the form zin looks familiar, it’s probably from a sentence like the second one below:

1. Anha adakhak. “I’m eating.”
2. Anha zin adakhak. “I’m still eating.”

Zin is one of those post-subject particles that acts like certain auxiliaries do in English. Now we see a bit of its history in the word zinay, which is itself in a rarely seen form: the Dothraki active participle. (In case you’re wondering, no, there is no [longer a] verb associated with this word.) And, also a bit rare, the adjective zinay agrees with the inanimate noun in plurality, even though the inanimate noun can’t display number. And rarer still: the sequence yi, which is quite rare in Dothraki (e.g. no word begins with yi). So a small phrase, but some fun stuff going on.

Once Dany has her bloodriders’ attention, she tells them what to do:

• Ma yer adothrae tith; ma yer heshtith; ma yer valshtith. “You ride east; you southeast; and you northeast.”

Never thought the ordinal directions would ever see the light of day. Glad I’d already coined them, though! After this, it’s Rakharo, I believe, who asks:

• Fin kisha fonoki, zhey khaleesi? “What do we seek, khaleesi?”

Fonat means “to hunt”, and by adding the suffix -(s)o, you get fonolat, which focuses on the beginning of the event: the event’s inception. This translates in various ways in English (e.g. “to track”), but in a non-hunting context, it means something like “to seek” (i.e. to search for with an uncertain chance of success).

After this, Daenerys delivers one of her longer Dothraki speeches—perhaps her longest to date. Here’s the whole thing:

• Vaes, che thiri che drivi. Ma verakasaris ma voji. Che ashefaes che tozaraes che Havazzhife Zhokwa. Ezo athchilar Athasaroon Virzetha hatif kishi, ma reki vekha yomme moon. “Cities, living or dead. Caravans and people. Rivers, or lakes, or the Great Salt Sea. Find how far the Red Waste extends before us, and what lies on the other side.”

In fact, there was actually one more line after this that got cut. I looked at that the first time and thought, “Are you sure? That’s pretty long…” And, indeed, it was. Better to have more to choose from than less, though.

I had to ponder what the Dothraki might do with the concept of “caravan”. Certainly caravans would be known to them: they travel all over and caravans exist. I came up with verakasar, which ultimately derives from the root e (heh, heh) which is used in the verb elat, which means “to go”. Through regular derivation, we get verat from elat, the former of which means “to travel”. One who travels, then, is a verak, and a group of them is a verakasar. And, ultimately, that’s what a caravan is: a group of travelers. Many are commercial in nature, but the Dothraki don’t trade, so probably would have little interest in that aspect of it (well, save that a traveling merchant would probably make a good target for sacking and pillaging).

In the third sentence we see two of my favorite words that I wasn’t sure would ever see the light of day: ashefa “river” and tozara “lake”. Both were created at around the same time, and were created very early. I was looking to create vocabulary sets that fit together, and so both of these (bodies of water, trisyllabic, ending in -a) helped to establish a semi-regular pattern for animate nouns. There are a number that fit this description, and it also says a little bit about the Dothraki worldview (i.e. the agency present in natural forces like a river or the wind).

The last sentence was actually quite difficult. I had to think for quite a bit how it would make sense to express that sentence in Dothraki. A more literal translation will give you a better idea for how exactly it works:

• Ezo athchilar Athasaroon Virzetha hatif kishi, ma reki vekha yomme moon. “Find the extent of the Red Waste before us, and that which lies beyond it.”

Athchilar there might also be translated as “limit”. It derives from chilat, a verb that means “to be prostrate”. A closer English expression might be “the lie”, in…huh. Having trouble coming up with an English expression. Well, there’s also “the lay”, as in “the lay of the land”, but I’m sure you can also say something like, “Give me the lie of your proposal and I’ll tell you what I think of it”. We also see an indefinite relative clause in the second part of this sentence (I mentioned these initially here, but never discussed them—and there’s certainly no room to discuss them here. I’ll get to it, though). That single example may be enough to help the dothraki.org folks to figure out the rest.

Finally, Dany approaches Rakharo individually and says:

• Yer athzalar nakhoki anni, zhey qoy qoyi. “You are my last hope, blood of my blood.”

Or at least that’s what I have written down. Thinking back, doesn’t she start out with zhey qoy qoyi? I need to hit up HBO GO and watch it again (though maybe someone will remember). Whichever order it is, athzalar should look familiar. The verb zalat is both “to want” and “to hope”, and here it’s fulfilling the latter function. The word nakhok is actually very similar to an ordinal number in its behavior. It derives from the same stem that gives us nakhat, which means “to stop”, and nakholat, which means “to finish”. In order to modify a noun with an ordinal like “first”, “second”, etc., you put the ordinal after the noun and put it in the genitive. That’s what you see here.

Finally, Rakharo replies with:

• Anha vos oziyenek shafkea, zhey qoy qoyi. “I will not fail you, blood of my blood.”

The verb there is ziyenelat, derived from the same stem that gives us yeni, “failure”, which features in the Dothraki translation of “WTF?” (i.e. Ki fin yeni?). The circumfix zi(r)- -(s)e is something like “mis(o)-” in English (borrowed from Greek), and indicates some sort of a value judgment—i.e. that whatever happened happened and it was bad. That seemed appropriate for this type of failure.

And, there you have it! Just a short scene in episode 1, but a good chunk of Dothraki. I can’t at present recall if Elyes Gabel’s ad lib made it in (it was such a short thing), but perhaps those who have it fresh in their minds can let me know. Did you hear the mysterious word gwe?

Great to have Game of Thrones back on a weekly basis! There’s some really cool Dany/Dothraki scenes on the horizon, so stay tuned!

Update: Whoops! Missed a line. Nice catch, zhey ingsve!

Indeed, season 2 (or series 2, depending on where you’re reading this from) is nearly upon us. This is a small announcement to let regular readers know that during the season I’m going to move away from the regular Dothraki qua Dothraki posts and write up responses to and commentaries on the episodes as we move through the second season (once it’s aired somewhere in the world, the spoiler curtain has lifted. Me nem nesa). Of course, since this is the Dothraki blog, I’ll be focusing on how a given episode relates to the Dothraki language and culture, and I’ll also discuss the Dothraki lines in each episode.

Before moving on, though, I’ve a bit of business to take care of. Last week I did an AMA over at Reddit (you can see the whole thing here), and redditor dopaminer asked the following:

Have you received requests from friends to make their names sound like the word for “awesome” or anything like that? (PS, if you still need to some up with a word for awesome, can it have the sound “rachel” in it?)

Of course, Dothraki has a word for “awesome” (vezhven), but I said I’d come up with something, and I have.

When it comes to flora and fauna vocabulary, I try to research what the Dothraki Sea might be like, but as you read through the Song of Ice and Fire series, George R. R. Martin’s always throwing wild cards in. I’ve tried to come up with words for all the animals that the Dothraki encounter, and a good percentage of those they would likely encounter (e.g. animals around Slaver’s Bay and surrounding environs). We’ve already seen (and, indeed, already had a word for) the mighty lion, hrakkar, but in A Dance with Dragons we were introduced to the city of Volantis, where there are two major political parties: The Elephants and the Tigers. We’d seen elephants before (or at least in cyvasse), but this was, to my knowledge, the first mention of tigers (or tiger cloaks, for that matter). As it seems only right that the Dothraki would come up with their own words for the mightiest of beasts, “tiger” is a good candidate for a new stem.

While most animate nouns that aren’t humans end in a vowel, there are a number of beast words that are disyllabic and end in a consonant—to wit:

• hrakkar “lion”
• noah “bull”
• qlaseh “deer (archaic)”
• hlizif “bear”
• kolver “eagle”

And, since tigers are awesome, it seems only fitting to add a new one to the list:

• rachel “tiger”

There you go, dopaminer! The word is, of course, stressed on the second syllable, and the vowels are different (and the consonants, a bit), but romanized, you can see the resemblance. And, hey, now we’ve got half of the Volantine political factions in Dothraki! Racheli Volanti. I like it. Now we just need “elephant”…

To everyone else, let the countdown begin! I’ve seen the first episode, and it was damn good. I think everyone will be pleased. Fonas chek!

(Oh, and regarding the featured image, I didn’t have any tiger pictures, so that’s, uh…a murloc. That’s close, right?)

Tonight I went to the season 2 cast and crew premiere event for Game of Thrones in LA. It’s a great venue (the Ray Kurtzman Theater at CAA), of course, and a fun time out, but it’s also nice to see people I mainly communicate with via e-mail face to face—though, as usual, I forgot to get pictures. However, you can see Bryan Cogman in this shot:

Last time we saw the first two episodes of season 1; this time we just the first episode of season 2. But…man! These guys do good work. I won’t give anything away, but one thing viewers will notice at the very beginning: Peter Dinklage’s name has moved on up to the east side, as it were (when the first episode airs, compare it to the season 1 intro). Granted, some of the names that were ahead of his aren’t around any longer, but nonetheless, it’s well-deserved!

After the screening was over, there was an after party, and as I was waiting to get my car, I finally had a chance to chat face-to-face with the man himself, khali khali (or perhaps khal khaloa?), zhey Drogo: Jason Momoa.

So, I knew Jason Momoa was buff; we’ve seen that. I don’t think I fully appreciated just how tall he was. Check out this photo:

And hes’ not even standing up tall! Bet that dude could dunk if he put his mind to it. After that one, he said we should make angry, Drogo faces. The result:

It’s an iPhone camera, so we looked at the picture afterwards, and Jason’s exact words were, “Dude, you look constipated!” Yeah… Oops! Truth is, I just couldn’t do an angry face, because I was so floored to be meeting and talking to Lisa Bonet (i.e. Denise). I mean, I grew up with The Cosby Show: That family feels like they’re real to me! I didn’t say anything (after all, every one of the main cast members has heard every comment and question in the world about The Cosby Show ten billion times over), but I couldn’t keep my face from smiling.

At the after party at The Eveleigh, there was legitimate full-course dinner food there, as well as appetizers (which I was grateful for, since I hadn’t eaten much that day). Here’s what I had:

See how red that meat is?! Man, that was good! So that got me to thinking: How would you characterize rare vs. well-done meat in Dothraki? Not an easy question. In my experience, those who live in the Midwest (of America) on farms and actually have a hand in the whole food preparation process only eat well-done meat. Ask for something rare in their presence, and they’ll give you a look like you just stepped out of a chicken. (Think about that one for a minute.)

While the Dothraki are preparing their own meat, I can’t help but think they wouldn’t share this prohibition (I wanted to say superstition, but I’m sure farm people have good reasons for distrusting rare meat [and I'm sure I don't want to know what those reasons are]). After all, they have pregnant women eat a raw horse’s heart which has just been ripped from a live horse’s body—and they think this will help the fetus, as opposed to lead to salmonella, or something. So “raw” probably isn’t the word for it.

Looking over the vocabulary, I already have words that I think will cover one scale—both vegetation and meat:

• chosh “fresh” ~ rikh “rotten”

This is one scale (the “how likely is this to be bad?” scale), and I think it works fine for meat. So chosh can cover “raw” or “rare”, depending on the circumstance. In addition to this, though, there’s also the heating scale. Given what we see of the Dothraki, it doesn’t seem to me like they’ve invested a lot in slow-cooking or baking: it’s probably burnt or not burnt. Given those two extremes, going by the color of the meat seems like a good way to characterize the meat:

• virzeth “red” ~ kazga “black”

So if you ever get a Dothraki waiter, you’ve got two options: che gavat virzeth che gavat kazga. And to me it seems likely that, in the world of Dothraki cuisine (to the extent that that phrase even makes sense), it’s not the case that there’s a dish and you decide how “done” you like your meat—rather, there are dishes where the meat will be virzeth, and dishes where the meat will be kazga, and switching them doesn’t make sense (like if you ordered chicken parmigiana and you got steak parmigiana instead of chicken: it’s just a different dish). That’s my read. What do you think? (Actually, I wonder what they’d think over at The Inn at the Crossroads…)

Tonight I went to the season 2 cast and crew premiere event for Game of Thrones in LA. It’s a great venue (the Ray Kurtzman Theater at CAA), of course, and a fun time out, but it’s also nice to see people I mainly communicate with via e-mail face to face—though, as usual, I forgot to get pictures. However, you can see Bryan Cogman in this shot:

Last time we saw the first two episodes of season 1; this time we just the first episode of season 2. But…man! These guys do good work. I won’t give anything away, but one thing viewers will notice at the very beginning: Peter Dinklage’s name has moved on up to the east side, as it were (when the first episode airs, compare it to the season 1 intro). Granted, some of the names that were ahead of his aren’t around any longer, but nonetheless, it’s well-deserved!

After the screening was over, there was an after party, and as I was waiting to get my car, I finally had a chance to chat face-to-face with the man himself, khali khali (or perhaps khal khaloa?), zhey Drogo: Jason Momoa.

So, I knew Jason Momoa was buff; we’ve seen that. I don’t think I fully appreciated just how tall he was. Check out this photo:

And hes’ not even standing up tall! Bet that dude could dunk if he put his mind to it. After that one, he said we should make angry, Drogo faces. The result:

It’s an iPhone camera, so we looked at the picture afterwards, and Jason’s exact words were, “Dude, you look constipated!” Yeah… Oops! Truth is, I just couldn’t do an angry face, because I was so floored to be meeting and talking to Lisa Bonet (i.e. Denise). I mean, I grew up with The Cosby Show: That family feels like they’re real to me! I didn’t say anything (after all, every one of the main cast members has heard every comment and question in the world about The Cosby Show ten billion times over), but I couldn’t keep my face from smiling.

At the after party at The Eveleigh, there was legitimate full-course dinner food there, as well as appetizers (which I was grateful for, since I hadn’t eaten much that day). Here’s what I had:

See how red that meat is?! Man, that was good! So that got me to thinking: How would you characterize rare vs. well-done meat in Dothraki? Not an easy question. In my experience, those who live in the Midwest (of America) on farms and actually have a hand in the whole food preparation process only eat well-done meat. Ask for something rare in their presence, and they’ll give you a look like you just stepped out of a chicken. (Think about that one for a minute.)

While the Dothraki are preparing their own meat, I can’t help but think they wouldn’t share this prohibition (I wanted to say superstition, but I’m sure farm people have good reasons for distrusting rare meat [and I'm sure I don't want to know what those reasons are]). After all, they have pregnant women eat a raw horse’s heart which has just been ripped from a live horse’s body—and they think this will help the fetus, as opposed to lead to salmonella, or something. So “raw” probably isn’t the word for it.

Looking over the vocabulary, I already have words that I think will cover one scale—both vegetation and meat:

• chosh “fresh” ~ rikh “rotten”

This is one scale (the “how likely is this to be bad?” scale), and I think it works fine for meat. So chosh can cover “raw” or “rare”, depending on the circumstance. In addition to this, though, there’s also the heating scale. Given what we see of the Dothraki, it doesn’t seem to me like they’ve invested a lot in slow-cooking or baking: it’s probably burnt or not burnt. Given those two extremes, going by the color of the meat seems like a good way to characterize the meat:

• virzeth “red” ~ kazga “black”

So if you ever get a Dothraki waiter, you’ve got two options: che gavat virzeth che gavat kazga. And to me it seems likely that, in the world of Dothraki cuisine (to the extent that that phrase even makes sense), it’s not the case that there’s a dish and you decide how “done” you like your meat—rather, there are dishes where the meat will be virzeth, and dishes where the meat will be kazga, and switching them doesn’t make sense (like if you ordered chicken parmigiana and you got steak parmigiana instead of chicken: it’s just a different dish). That’s my read. What do you think? (Actually, I wonder what they’d think over at The Inn at the Crossroads…)

As we’re approaching the April 1st premiere of season 2 of Game of Thrones, I thought it’d be worthwhile to take a look back at the early days of Dothraki.

To start us off, let’s take a look at the Dothraki that existed in the books before I took a crack at it. Step number one was deciding how the words in the books would (and/or could and/or should) be pronounced. I came up with a solution (summarized here), but it wasn’t without controversy. In analyzing the words in the books, I held to the following principles:

1. The spellings in the books are canon.
2. Different spelling = different sound.
3. The resultant phonology should be linguistically sound.
4. The resultant phonology shouldn’t be too difficult for an English-speaking actor to pronounce.

As a result of the above, the hr in hranna is pronounced differently from the rh in rhaggat, and so forth. There were a couple of changes I made, though, and they’re worth discussing. One minor one was a spelling change that can be illustrated nicely with one name: Jhiqui.

That’s how her name is spelled in the book. I didn’t quite know what to make of jh when I first saw it. It contrasts with j by itself (consider haj and Jommo), which means that jh should be a different sound from j. Since the “h” in English tends to make stops into fricatives (cf. “t” > “th”) and move the place of fricatives towards the palate (cf. “s” > “sh”), I thought it’d be reasonable to assume that jh stood for a voiced palato-alveolar fricative ([ʒ], like the “z” in “azure”). I may have been influenced by the fact that [ʒ] is my favorite sound, but I still think the supposition is a reasonable one.

Anyway, this is where I made a decision. Since jh is rather a bizarre digraph, I decided to change the spelling to zh. I’ve always thought that that was the best way to represent the sound to an English speaker, because it fits this analogy:

s : sh :: z : zh

That, however, has not proved to be the case. Not only did some of the actors have trouble with zh (often pronouncing it as if it were z), but I’ve also heard from others that zh is problematic.

There are two reasons I can think of that an English speaker wouldn’t do well with zh for [ʒ]: One, they don’t know how the digraph ought to be pronounced (at a glance), or two, they misinterpret it as a sequence of z and h.

At the heart of both problems, I believe, is the nebulous nature of the phoneme [ʒ] in English. There are no minimal pairs (or at least no common ones. Perhaps if someone knows of one, they can leave a comment), but there are near minimal pairs in “pleasure” and “pressure”. (Ooh… Actually, what about “azure” and “asher”?) Additionally, there is no systematic way to spell the sound. It appears as “ge” in “rouge”, “g” in “genre”, “s” in “leisure”, “si” in “fusion”, “z” in “azure”, “j” in “Taj Mahal”, and part of “x” in “luxury”. English has a funky spelling system, but for just about every other consonant phoneme, there is a definite, basic spelling. Not so with [ʒ].

Daenerys has suggested that it’s more difficult to get zh right before a and o; less so before i and e. This makes intuitive sense because zh is a palatal sound, and i and e are front vowels. She suggested that zh might be spelled zhy, but perhaps just in front of a and o—which does make sense. I’d thought previously of spelling the sound zy. For the sake of neatness, though, I’d want to respell what is now spelled as sh as sy, which doesn’t seem ideal… As a result, I think we’re stuck with zh.

Anyway, the whole point of bringing this up is that I decided to respell jh as zh (thought it’d be easier. Oh well). This doesn’t mean, though, that the spellings in the books ought to change. Since it’s a one-to-one correspondence, jh is just the book’s way of spelling Dothraki zh (or vice-versa). This means that if anything from modern Dothraki with zh shows up in the books, it would be spelled with jh, e.g. jhavvorsa, mahrajh, vejhven, etc.

Oh, and also present in Jhiqui’s name is the change from qu to kw, which shouldn’t be too controversial. Beyond that, though, I made a couple of other changes which are worth noting.

The letters p and b occur almost nowhere in Dothraki. In fact they only appear in two places: In the names Pono and Bharbo. Given the sound change I proposed (a merger of older p and f as well as b and v), it seemed reasonable enough to have them survive only in names. As the Havazh Dothraki is large, it seems reasonable to assume that there are probably several different varieties of Dothraki spoken by different khalasars. They’re probably mutually intelligible (being able to communicate in Vaes Dothrak is motivation enough to maintain communicability), but it seems likely that some varieties may have preserved the p/f and b/v distinctions, meaning that this is a dialectal variation that Dothraki speakers everywhere are likely aware of (kind of like the t/k distinction in Hawaiian).

While for the most part the schema I came up with above worked out pretty well, there were a couple places where it may have caused more problems than it solved. One obvious one is the word khaleesi. Going by Dothraki’s spelling system, the word should be pronounced [ˈxa.le.e.si] (or KHA-lay-yay-see). More often than not, though, it’s pronounced [ka.ˈli.si] (or kah-LEE-see). There’s not much to say about the [k] and the stress (bound to happen), but the “ee” part is troubling. It seems quite sensible that any English speaker would pronounce the “ee” as if it were like the “ee” in “keep” or “seem”. What wasn’t sensible, perhaps, was my idea that it wouldn’t be any trouble to switch over to the “real” Dothraki pronunciation (i.e. pronouncing it just like it’s spelled). Evidently they made an executive decision on the show to pronounce it like the “ee” in “keep” even when it’s spoken in Dothraki. And I suppose I can’t blame them. It does seem reasonable enough. If I had it to do over, perhaps I would’ve bent the rules just a little bit and made the official spelling khalisi—or maybe even khalissi to get the stress right. Oh well. Live and learn.

One I’ve mentioned before elsewhere (but not here, I believe) is George R. R. Martin’s peculiar pronunciation of the word “Dothraki”. Those who have seen him in person know how he pronounces it, but if you haven’t, he pronounces the last “i” as if it were like the “i” in “bike” or “fungi” or “alumni”. I was shocked the first time I heard it. I thought I simply misheard him, but no: His pronunciation is consistent on this point. It does certainly change the character and flavor of the word quite a bit. As far as I know, though, he’s the only one that pronounces the word this way, so I didn’t feel too bad about giving it the usual “ee” pronunciation.

Finally, there’s the issue of the vowel sequence ae. I honestly had no idea what to do with this. I thought I’d be well served in treating the two as separate vowels (as in Spanish “caer”). It seems, though, that the preferred pronunciation is like the “a” in “gate”. Aside from the variant of “Rachel” spelled “Raechel”, I don’t think we have that sequence pronounced that way in English, so I’m not sure if I would’ve guessed that that was how it was “supposed” to be pronounced. On the show, most of the time they went with standard Dothraki pronunciation. The one major time where they didn’t was with the pronunciation of the name “Rhaego”. That, however, is Dany’s old brother’s name (Rhaegar) with a Dothraki -o added in place of the Valyrian -ar, so it’s not too bizarre that the spelling has a different pronunciation (it’s not a true Dothraki name, after all).

Well, I had intended all of this to be rather the introduction to a longer post. The word count thingy at the bottom of this post tells me I’m up over 1400 words already, though, so I suppose I’d better bring this to a close. I’ll likely revisit this topic some time in the future, though, as there’s more to be said. Until then, fonas chek!