This concludes my work on Game of Thrones. I was happy to get another big speech, but was utterly baffled when I received the lines as all of Daenerys's lines were attributed to Missandei. I was completely taken aback by this. My first thought was that Dany dies, and that somehow her spirit goes into Missandei, and she speaks through her...? Turns out the explanation was far simpler: By throwing Missandei in there, they were able to keep me from guessing or figuring out that Missandei dies this season. Thus the misattribution was all due to security.
For students of Dothraki, I didn't forget to add zhey to the very first line. It just didn't feel right if she was addressing a massive group. I don't know. That certainly wasn't what I intended when I created the word, but...I don't know. I just couldn't do it. It didn't make sense.
In that first line I was able to somehow work in a word coined in honor of Bernie Taupin, famed lyricist for Elton John. I met a couple good friends of his at the e.g. Conference, where they won a contest to have me use their names as words in one of my languages. They decided to pass the honor on to Bernie, and begged me to work his name into the show somehow, as he was a huge Game of Thrones fan. Of course, there is no [b] in Dothraki, so verni was the closest I could get. Since shafka triggers plural agreement, in the past tense it has to be vernish—and then Emilia didn't pronounce it exactly right. But it's the thought that counts!
If you saw my note from 804, you'll know that Dany had a line cut where she speaks some Astapori Valyrian. Well, she made for it here, a bit! In her first line to Grey Worm, she starts in Astapori Valyrian and then switches to High Valyrian when she gets to "with me", ynoma. Thereafter it's High Valyrian the whole way. Worth pointing out that Grey Worm takes an interesting journey in this show, for at the end of this line, she names him Āeksȳso, that is Āeksio, or Master—the exact same word used for the Masters in Slaver's Bay. Also in this line is a word I coined in honor of someone named Kara. I found it unlikely that I'd be able to sneak that word into the show, but then it was called for! That was a happy accident.
As we continue, they really pulled out all the stops for this speech. It was tough to translate; took me a couple days. Lot of new words, actually. One of them was a borrowing. Dany lists a lot of non-Valyrian place names at the end of this speech, and one of them is the Jade Sea. It seemed likely to me that if Valyrian was going to have a word for "jade", it would be borrowed from Asshai'i. The only thing is Asshai'i doesn't exist yet (I created a bit of it for season 1, but since it wasn't used, I don't consider it canon). To fill the gap, I decided to borrow a word from the Asshai'i language as created by one of my students in the class I taught at UC Berkeley, Linguistics 183: The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention. The student is Raizada Vaid, and in his version of the Asshai'i language, the word [ðʰeːa] means "jewel". I borrowed this into High Valyrian as zēa, specifically a word for "jade". I call this a salsa borrowing, where a generic word from one language is borrowed into another but given a specific meaning—much the way salsa just means "sauce" in Spanish, but has a very specific meaning in English. Thus, you have Zēo Embrot, "to the Jade Sea". Thanks, Raizada!
To close, I could ask for nothing better than to go out on a line from Jacob Anderson—and, as usual, it was perfect. What an unbelievable treasure that man is. He'll probably never speak Astapori Valyrian again, but at least I have all his lines from the series to listen to hereafter and remember. I couldn't have hoped for anyone better to speak one of my languages.
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but this is the end of ten years of my life that were totally and completely unexpected, and which have irrevocably changed the course of my life. It's not like I was bumming around Hollywood and finally got onto a show that made it big: This was my first ever Hollywood experience. I've since gone on to either work on or discuss working on more than 70 other projects—films, movies, video games, books… I've written two books (third one's coming soon), I've given talks all over the world, I'm financially stable... It's more than success than any language creator could ever have dreamed of, and that any one language creator has any right to. I'll never forget that, and I'll always be grateful.
