Imaginary Worlds - When All Is Said in Dune

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Back in 2018, I interviewed language creator David J. Peterson about how he invented Dothraki for Game of Thrones and other fictional languages in fantasy worlds. David and his wife Jessie just finished a huge project – developing the Fremen language for Dune: Part Two. I talk with the couple about their creative process and the challenge of imagining simple English phrases in the Chakobsa language that Frank Herbert imagined in his Dune novels. We also hear my 2018 episode, “Do You Speak Conlang?” where I also talked with Marc Okrand, inventor of the Klingon language, and Robyn Stewart, a language consultant for Star Trek: Discovery. Plus, Jen Usellis -- a.k.a. Klingon Pop Warrior -- will give you a serious case of earworms (not the kind from Wrath of Khan.) For more episodes about Dune, check out my 2017 episode The Book of Dune, where I talked with Muslim fans of the series about the way Frank Herbert incorporated aspects of Islam into the books. And in 2021, I did an episode called The Ecology of Dune where I looked at the environmental messages in the books and whether Frank Herbert’s environmental sensibilities still hold up today. This episode is sponsored by Surfshark and Magic Spoon. Get Surfshark VPN at Surfshark.deals/imaginary and enter the promo code IMAGINARY for three extra months for free. Get a custom bundle of Magic Spoon cereal at magicspoon.com/imaginary. Enter the promo code IMAGINARY at checkout to save five dollars off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. I saw Dune Part 1 at home because it came out during the pandemic. So I was excited to see Dune Part 2 in IMAX, and I did not come away disappointed. Now, Frank Herbert's novel Dune from 1965 used to have a reputation for being, quote, unfilmable. The book is so densely packed with imagined customs and cultures. When I read it, I felt like I had traveled 20,000 years into the future. The idea that you couldn't translate this novel to a movie only got worse after David Lynch's 1984 film adaptation completely flopped. But the 2021

movie was a hit, and Dune Part 2 has been an even bigger success. The cast and the director have been doing a lot of publicity for Dune Part 2, but so have a pair of linguists. David and Jesse Peterson developed the language of the Fremen for the movie. The Fremen are the indigenous population that live on the desert planet Arrakis. Their language is called Shikopse. I first interviewed David Peterson in 2018 for an episode about how people create languages for fantasy worlds. Back then, he was a one-man band. Now, he and his wife, Jessie, work together on every project. I wanted to catch up with David to find out what it's been like working on the Dune movies and how they work as a couple. But before we get to that conversation, I want to play my episode from 2018.

It will give you a lot of context of what goes into constructed languages. I began that episode by talking with somebody who is not a language creator. She's just a fan of a fantasy language. Jen Uselas is a singer in Chicago. And about eight years ago, a friend of hers told her about a show that was looking for performers. The show was a Klingon Christmas Carol. Now, Jen had not watched a lot of Star Trek before. But I have this, like, hardcore love of really goofy niche theater.

And I was like, really? What do I have to do to get cast in that? And he goes, well, are you allergic to latex? And I was like, no. So he goes, we'll come out and audition. And then she learned something else about the show. All of her lines would be in the Klingon language. And yes, Klingon is a fully functioning language that actors who play Klingons in Star Trek usually have to learn. In this case, in the Klingon Christmas Carol, there would be super titles above the stage in English, so the audience would know what's going on. Now that might be intimidating for some performers, but Jen has an opera background. So singing in a foreign language is not unusual for her. I picked up on the language very quickly and the pronunciation. And my fight skills were, my fight choreography skills weren't so great, but... Wait, did you say

that there's fighting involved in the show? Oh, absolutely. The Fezziwig party, it turns into a giant bar brawl. You know, Klingons aren't having a good time if there's not a little blood involved. She did the show for two years, and then she found out that a podcast called Improvise Star Trek was looking for someone to sing Kiss Me by Sixpence Down the Richer in

Klingon, and they were wondering if she was interested. And I was like, oh, heck yes. Within 24 hours, we were picked up by TeamCoco.com and the Mary Sue and just a whole bunch of other big blogs and websites. And we're like, oh, my gosh, what just happened? It was, the response to it was overwhelmingly positive. It's kind of crazy because like the internet, I always say like the internet hates everything.

But for some reason, the internet really liked this. And then Jen had an idea. What if she put out an album of pop songs in Klingon? She worked with translators on songs that she thought a Klingon would sing, like Love is a Battlefield. And that album did so well. She started doing concerts in full costume and makeup. In fact, she created a whole new persona for herself, the Klingon pop warrior.

Is it hard to sing in Klingon? Yes. Simple answer. I'm just kidding, I'm just, yes, it's not easy. There are some really awkward sounds. It's pretty grating on the vocal cords. There's very harsh, guttural sounds in the language. And you just, you get a lot of that kind of stuff. And and then trying to make it melodic and pretty. I usually don't do more than a 60 minute performance just because more than that. And it just starts to feel really wrong. To this day, she cannot believe there is an audience out there waiting for a Klingon rock star.

She cannot believe there was an audience out there waiting for a Klingon rock star. But if you look at the history of constructed languages, or conlangs for short, this was a long time coming. I mean, people have been inventing languages on their own for centuries, you know, just as a hobby. But those languages all die off because they're usually just spoken among friends. The difference now is because with sci-fi fantasy, we can see a whole imaginary culture attached to these constructed languages. But what happens when we speak the language of fantasy characters in the real world? Does it change the way we communicate with each other? And what we reveal about ourselves? Turns out, yes. My brother-in-law works in IT. He also listens to this podcast. Hi. Whenever we travel with him,

he always sets up a VPN, a private virtual network. And then he'll tell us scary stories about people that used public Wi-Fi at a conference or a hotel, and then they got hacked. But we have listened to his advice, and we now have a VPN service. Surfshark. Surfshark keeps you safe and protects your privacy by covering up everything you do online. Anyone who tries to snoop on you won't be able to see what you're doing or where you're doing it from. It's kind of like using a made-up language that nobody understands except for you and your family. Even if you're staying home, Surfshark can move your location

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That's surfshark.deals slash imaginary. Now the granddaddy of all constructed languages and fantasy worlds, at least in the modern era, is J.R.R. Tolkien. And I've talked before how Tolkien was really groundbreaking in a lot of ways, like having maps of Middle Earth. And the same thing is true with the languages that Tolkien developed for the elves in his stories. Michael Drought is a Tolkien expert, and he says that Tolkien was one of the first modern

fantasy writers to appreciate how much we can learn about a fictional culture by studying their language. And I think that that interaction between culture and language in history is just much easier to see in something like a constructed language. And he thinks that studying the language of a fantasy culture can give us a new perspective on our own language and how it reflects our culture in ways that we often take for granted. And to be able to see it all right there and like, you know, a manageable amount in Middle Earth, I think gives us great insight into how this is happening in the sort of distributed intelligence of the millions of people who are making the culture we live in,

of the millions of people who are making the culture we live in, in full Big Earth. But Tolkien didn't think that people in full Big Earth would try to actually speak Elvish. And we know that because he barely created any verbs for the Elvish languages. So when they came time, they wanted to write dialogue in Elvish for the Peter Jackson films. They just had no verbs. And finally, David Sallow was a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, who was their consultant. They said, you've got to just make some up, you know, use the same sound system, use the same rules that Tolkien had, but we don't have enough verbs to have a conversation. But really the films gave it such an impetus and you had people wanting to expand the language and people wanting to write poetry in Elvish and write stories and dialogue doing

what had happened in Klingon. But for people who consider themselves Tolkien purists, any change to the language that Tolkien created is basically heresy. And so what you get then is a lot of a split because people say, that's not real Elvish. And others saying, you're a stick in the mud and not allowing us to do what the language should do. And like, no, that's not really what Tolkien said. He never came up with this word. And there's always, there's always something that you can point to that's like awkward. There's no Elvish word for

milk. So let's call it first water because we have a word for water and we have a word for first. And the more like canonical people like that's so ridiculous. Tolkien would never compound like that. And so not only did you have groups of Elvish linguists, you had two competing groups of Elvish linguists who hated each other. But when the Klingon language was created, nobody thought that would take off either. Least of all, the guy that actually invented the language, Mark Okrand. Mark was hired by Paramount in the mid-1980s to invent the Klingon language for the movie Star Trek III, but he did not invent the language completely from scratch. We did hear Klingons speaking their own language in the first Star Trek movie in 1979, but turns out they were speaking gibberish.

So I listened to that and wrote down, you know, phonetically what I was hearing, wrote down what the subtitles meant, and imposed a structure on it. Now, even though the audience wouldn't really know this, just by reading the subtitles or hearing the sounds of Klingon, Mark wanted the Klingon language to feel alien in its syntax. Mark wanted the Klingon language to feel alien in its syntax. In any language, there's sort of three basic parts of speech in a sentence, which is the subject, the verb, and the object.

You have to put them in some order or other. In English, it happens to be that order, the subject, and then the verb, and then the object. But the least common, by far, are the ones where the object comes first. So that's what I chose for Klingon. For Klingon, I chose object and then verb and then subject. Mark says the actors playing Klingons were great students because this was a creative challenge that a lot of them didn't expect to get. But then Mark himself actually faced a creative challenge when he was brought back to work on Star Trek VI.

And that movie was about a detente between the Federation and the Klingon Empire that was supposed to reflect the end of the Cold War in real life. And in one scene, the Klingons reveal that they can quote Shakespeare in English. But the director had a last-minute addition. He wanted Christopher Plummer's Klingon character to quote Shakespeare in Klingon. In fact, he wanted him to say, to be or not to be.

And I thought, oh no. And the reason I thought, oh no, is because one of the decisions I made when I was making up the grammar of Klingon was that there's no verb to be. So Mark decided that the closest translation to that would be to live or not to live, which feels kind of Klingon-ish. So I go over to Christopher Plummer and he says, I understand you have a new phrase to teach me.

I said, yes. He says, what is it? Well, to say to live or not to live, there's a number of different ways I could have done that, but I kind of did it a very, very simple way. So it means live or live not, which is yin pa, yin be. So he says, yin? Yin? And I said, yeah. He says, that's too wimpy. That's too wimpy. He didn't say that. He said something else, but that's what he meant. He said, think of something else that's more Klingon-like. I said, oh, now what am I going to do? So I said, what if we say, he goes, is good. Let's do that. Well, up until that moment, was a suffix that meant to continue doing whatever the verb is. So if you say eat plus tah means to keep on eating, to continue eating, something like that.

So I kind of promoted tah to be a verb in its own right that means to continue, to go on, to endure. So Christopher Plummer changed the Klingon dictionary. And yes, Mark had written a Klingon dictionary, which was published in the mid-1980s. But what I thought, honestly and truly thought would happen is people would buy it, thumb through it, say, Oh, look, there's the Klingon word for shoe. Ha ha ha. You know, and put it on their coffee table. But that's not what happened. What happened is people bought it and read it very thoroughly and studied it. And a language speaking community started to get going.

Now, Mark had no idea that Klingon had taken off like this until he was invited to a conference of Klingon speakers. until he was invited to a conference of Klingon speakers. That was odd, and I wasn't prepared for it, frankly, because I'll admit I'm not a very good speaker of Klingon because when I was doing all this, there was no particular reason to be one. So when it started happening, I was kind of taken aback that people were doing it. But it was also fascinating to read what people were saying about the language. And I realized it was more complicated and interesting than I thought it was

when I was going along making it up. Now, as I mentioned earlier, constructed languages are nothing new. People have been making them up for years. In fact, David Peterson is a member of the Language Creation Society, which creates conlangs for their own sake. DAVID PETERSON There's also an element of writing to it, because when you're creating a lexicon, you're essentially creating the entire history of a people through their words. Aaron Powell Now, David has been hired to create languages for sci-fi fantasy worlds. In fact,

he actually won a competition to create Dothraki, the language of the warrior clans in Game of Thrones. It was incredibly grueling because I just spent every hour working on my proposal. I made it through the first round, which was judged by other language creators. Then I beefed up my proposal again. I had over 300 pages of material by this point in time. We sent the final four proposals off to the producers, and they chose mine. And David thought he had created the next big conlang that would take on a life of its own. You know, essentially the next Klingon. We were super excited about the Dothraki job.

Two months later, Avatar comes out. So if you're looking at something that took off, the Na'vi language, it did take off. It's still very successful. So then it's by the time Game of Thrones comes along, it's like, well, it's another created language. It never had a chance. After that, he was hired to create a few more conlangs, but they didn't take off either.

And then he got a job inventing a language for the CW show The 100, which is about the young descendants of people who survived a nuclear war. And this language, which he created called Trigittislang, was supposed to be an evolution of English in the far future.

Now this show, The 100, does not have a big audience, but the audience is young, very loyal, and they love these characters called the Grounders, speak Trigittislang. In fact, they ask David questions about it all the time. It's really wonderful. It kind of took me by surprise. This is the reaction I thought I was going to be getting to Dothraki, and that just never happened at all. thought I was going to be getting to Dothraki, and that just never happened at all.

David has now become an advocate for constructed languages being part of any fantasy culture, because he's seen how a conlang can really help bond a community of fans together, and it can be really effective in world building. And I think that, especially if you're talking about worlds that aren't our own, language is a detail that matters. It's not expensive to get somebody. Like, there are people that already are just spending almost every single free hour of their day working on a created language. That would be over the moon to have created, for example, a language for the Martians in Supergirl.

And so since it's not going to be super expensive, why not? I mean, God, it just kills me to hear when, you know, shows and movies are skating by on gibberish. It's just, there's no point to it right now. But David does think that there is a correlation between how often characters are featured on a show and how popular the language is. I mean, he thinks that one reason why Dothraki didn't catch on is that the Dothrakis weren't in the show very much after season one. And even though Klingon may be the envy of the con-laying world, even Klingon's popularity started to wane when Star Trek didn't feature the Klingons for many, many years. That's why a lot of Klingonists have been very excited about the new show,

Star Trek Discovery. The first season featured the Klingons very heavily. And in the conlang community, there's a lot of buzz around the language consultant on that show, Robin Stewart, who in many ways represents the next generation, no pun intended, of Klingon speakers. And there's also, I mean, let's face it head on, there's a stereotype about the Klingon speaker being a virgin that lives in his mother's basement. Somebody that has the intellectual capital

and the spare time to learn an entire language from scratch for fun has enough other negotiable skills that they do not need to live in their mother's basement and are probably doing quite well for themselves. In fact, beyond being a Klingon expert, Robin is also a pilot. And if you hear the wind whipping through her cell phone, it's because she was calling me from an undisclosed location near a military base in Canada. You know, I have the army life. I have the flying life and the Klingon life and probably more lives than that. Oh, by the way, you say your Klingon name is spelled Q-O-V.

How do you pronounce that? It's going to sound like a wind noise again. O-V? How do you pronounce that? It's going to sound like a wind noise again. Cove. I say it rhymes with stove, except the first sound is like you're choking on spinach. Cove? Yeah, you need some more c- in there.

Matt, have you ever choked on spinach, like you're eating it, and then you realize something's gone down your throat, and it's too much, and you have to go c- to get it back out again? Probably. I mean, I don't know if it's spinach, but certainly I've had that experience, so like, c-ove? I actually think that speaking. So like, oh. I actually think that speaking Klingon, you know, and having

the ability to say that, ugh, at will, may have saved my life. I was actually joking once and did that and food came right out. You know, I said to Robin, the one thing

that's always baffled me about the success of Klingon is that it's such a harsh language to speak and to listen to. I mean, it makes sense for the Klingons,

or this fierce alien warrior culture. They're often the antagonists in the story, or maybe anti-heroes. But she says that's the point. The Klingons are rowdy and boisterous and very blunt, which she finds freeing. It's actually easier to discuss really hot-button topics, because the same conversation hasn't been said over and over again. The same trite words aren't coming out.

I have a good friend whose father was murdered, and he told his Klingon friends that, in Klingon. There's no euphemisms in Klingon. You just say the things. It's so strange to have, like, learned these new words and have them go, like, you know, right to your soul. In fact, she says that Klingon has really become part of who she is in the real world. And we were talking once about body modification. There was somebody that came to one of the Kappa Ame, the Klingon conferences, and they had not just tattoos,

but had done some, you know, actual interesting body modifications. And I said, you know, in Klingon, I said, well, you know, by speaking Klingon, we're remapping the insides of our heads. That's funny because it totally ties into Arrival. You know, the short story, it was based on in the movie,

the idea that the way you speak a language begins to change the way you think. Yeah, that concept that the way someone speaks entirely is it, you know, changes the way that they can look at the world. You know, sadly, they have found very little evidence for it. It's so appealing. Jen Ucellus, the Klingon pop warrior, agrees with Robin. Taking on the attitude of a Klingon can be really liberating. Because everything about Klingons is hard.

They work hard, and they fight hard, but they also love really hard, and everything is very immediate for them. It's very much about living in the present, because, you know, today is a good day to die. But to keep evolving, Klingon does need to keep branching out. So it's not so dependent on Star Trek. And that's why I think that Jen's music also represents a next phase of Klingon culture evolving in the real world. And as I

mentioned before, she tries to pick songs that feel Klingon-like. But she's also pushing the boundaries of what a Klingon would say or sing. Even when I'm doing silly love ballads like My Heart Will Go On, there's something really powerful about a Klingon singing that song. When you sing that, is there a more literal translation to my heart will go on? Is like my heart will not explode or I will not stab myself or something like that? It actually, it's, you hear, you hear tah a lot in that song and tah means to continue. And we know that tah means to continue because of a change that Christopher Plummer added to the Klingon language. to continue because of a change that Christopher Plummer added to the Klingon language.

Although, there is another reason why My Heart Will Go On takes on a different meaning in Klingon. Klingons actually have fully redundant organ systems, so it kind of makes sense on a literal level that if something happened, the heart would go on. One of my favorite things on Star Trek was the replicator, which could make any food you asked for. Theoretically, you could ask it to make you a sugary cereal that you could enjoy guilt-free. Well, you don't need to go to the future for that. Magic Spoon has reinvented your favorite childhood cereals without 24th century technology. Magic Spoon cereals now come in four flavors.

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happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked. Remember, get your new delicious bowl of high-protein cereal at magicspoon.com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary to save $5 off. It's been really satisfying to see David Peterson doing publicity for Dune Part 2. As you heard six years ago, he was lamenting how often language creators

are taken for granted. David helped develop the Shakopsa language. That's the language of the Fremen people on the desert planet Arrakis. The novel Dune takes place 20,000 years in the future, but there are cultural fragments left over from our world. For instance, Shakopsa is not a made-up word. It's the name of a real language in the Caucasus region. But in the novels, Frank Herbert's fictionalized version of Shakopsa doesn't sound Russian. He actually incorporated a lot of words from Islam and Arabic cultures. Although Herbert was not as much of a linguist as Tolkien,

so there was a lot more work needed to expand what Herbert had established in the books. David was hired to work on Dune Part 1. Herbert had established in the books. David was hired to work on Dune Part 1. We did not hear a lot of Shakopsa in that film because the focus was on Timothee Chalamet's character Paul Atreides. He is part of an aristocratic family that is betrayed and destroyed. In Dune Part 2, Paul and his mother rally the Fremen people to help them overthrow the villains who betrayed them. When David came back to work on Dune Part 2, he had a new collaborator, his wife Jessie. They're now a team. I wanted to know how their partnership works. Honestly, it works really, really well. And I can say that with

a certain level of authority because I've done language creation projects collaboratively several times. I have never worked as well with anybody as well as I've worked with Jesse. It seems pretty natural. So Jesse, once you come on board, what were you most excited about in terms of working in Dune 2? Honestly, I was really excited to jump into the language itself just with vocabulary because David had created a system of these derivational suffixes that you could add to roots to create new words in really interesting ways. And so I honestly was really, really stoked about digging into that and creating more words.

And so for that, I basically had to learn what structures David had created for the language and everything that he had as a foundation for the first Dune movie. From there, we did a lot of vocabulary expansion. We needed a lot more words created. There was a big ramp up between Dune 1 and Dune 2. Dune 1, you know, I kind of got to spend my time creating the overall structure for the language. All of this was used rather minimally, and that was understood beforehand with the understanding that there was going to be a lot of material in the second movie. So how did you work with the understanding that there was going to be a lot of material in the second movie. So how did you work with the source material? Because Frank Herbert certainly had ideas as to what the Shakopso language should sound

and where it had sort of evolved from. Eh, kind of. I mean, there really isn't evidence of a language in there, like not like the way there is in George R. R. Martin's work. It's more he took words from different languages, a lot of them from Arabic, but also from many other languages, and would just use them periodically as terms, sometimes with the same meanings, sometimes with slightly altered meanings. But what you don't see is evidence of things like inflection and syntax. That was just on us.

Was there ever a time the two of you were working together and you sort of, you know, politely disagreed about something and you kind of went back and forth about it? All the time. Yeah. Like what? I love some examples. Oh, goodness. I can't think of a specific example. Yeah. Because like, you know, we also work on a ton of other stuff where that happens. I think it's more on other things. I think with Dune, because it was already like the structure was already there that at that point, it was more, if anything, I would bring, you know, a pile of ideas to David and say, sift through them and find one that seems to fit best. I'm a brainstormer, you know,

bring me a problem and I'm going to try to come up with 10 different ways to solve it and see which one kind of lands best with somebody else. And so it's not that I'm particularly invested in one idea more than the other. It's that, well, here's, 10 different routes that we could take to solve this, which one sounds best to you and let's do it. I know in some projects we've had disagreements with what the most, I'm going to air quote this, logical way of expanding a root through a particular derivational suffix or prefix might be where it's like, well, if you add a quality of X, this is what it should be interpreted as. This is what it means to me. And sometimes we disagree

on that because our brains apparently work a little differently at times. That's the usual marriage stuff. Well, I'm actually curious now, because I mean, you were working on all this stuff solo, and now you've got a partner you're working with. When you look at what you've created afterwards, is there a sense where you look at the work you created together and just say,

oh, you know what? This is taking this to a different level that I wasn't doing this entirely on my own. Yeah, that's the thing. Like the way I looked at it, all of the stuff we do, because I worked by myself for like 10 years and all the stuff we've done since then, I could have done all of that on my own. It wouldn't have been as good, period. I mean, and that's that's really the best way of looking at it. It features ideas that absolutely would never have occurred to me on my own. That's just 100 percent better across the board and definitely better documented. So you guys go. So you were in Hungary, right? That's

where you you went on set. Yeah. So once you got there, were there things that started to change once you started seeing the costumes, the sets, the getting a feel for it or even working with the actors? Well, we didn't actually get to see the actual sets and we did not work with the actors. And so we were separate from so it's we were there, but, you know, kind of on a different side, we did see more images because they, they did have a, you know, like along the walls, like pictures of costumes and props and things like that. So we did get to see more of that. It's hard to, to really pinpoint what was most beneficial about that experience, but I think it was a really big asset to be there to just have all day, every day reserved for the project because there was so much work to be done. And it was a way of saying, we're going to shut down everything else and only work on

these translations for a 10-day stretch and produce well over 100 pages of translations within that time frame. And it was really, really helpful for when we did, it may sound really small when we needed those clarifications, the kinds of things we needed clarification on, being able to just go directly and say, hey, here's our question and get it answered within 45 seconds. If we had gone back and forth over email with the time differences would have taken at minimum a two-day turnaround. And if they didn't necessarily understand exactly what we were asking, our question could have been answered in a different way, which would require another set of, no, that's not what we meant. And those emails are really easy to get lost in the shuffle,

especially on their end, because, you know, in the production, they're doing so many other things that just being there to be able to ask like, hey, real quick, here's the line, here's what we need. And that back and forth face to face was always about a minute long. And it answered so many of our questions. And we were able to just, you know, jump right back into it and not worry about it. Because that would sometimes set the full scene where knowing how one line was meant to be translated, we could then better understand the whole scene in terms of what the best approach would be for translating.

I love for you guys to get like really specific and describe, you know, was there like a particular scene you worked on that was really interesting challenge, you know, like what was going on in the scene? What were people saying to each other? There is a scene at the end where Paul is addressing the war council. And this was all done in English. And first off, we were like, this doesn't make sense because of the situation. This is the war council. Everybody here is Fremen. Why is he speaking English? And so on our own, we decided to translate this anyway. Part of it is like, you know, ask for forgiveness, not permission. But that's not quite what this is. You don't ask, hey, do you think we could translate this into Jakobsa? And they say, maybe. And they're like, all right, give us some time to do that. You say, we have translated this into Jakobsa. Here it is. And we think that it might make more sense to use this rather than English. And, you know,

the work is already done. So give it a shot. So, yeah, we translated this. But not only that, it was a difficult piece to translate. So the English is, but you're afraid. What if he could be the one? This could be the moment you've been waiting for all your life. You're praying now to your grandmother who passed away nine moons ago. She lost an eye. A rocket smashed her face as she was crossing the belt. She was 12 when it happened. At that time, this world had a Fremen named Dune. Some of this was quite simple, like, but you're afraid. What if he could be the one? This is part and parcel with stuff we'd already translated before. But didn't have a word for grandmother. That was, I think, an easier one.

Yeah, because we just derived it from we had a root for mother from which we'd also derived Reverend Mother. And it was like, all right, well, let's just come up with a strategy for grandmother. But this was interesting. Who passed away nine moons ago. Ago is like one of the worst words in English. What? Why? It's awful. Well, if you think about like, what even is it?

Just on the face of it, what part of speech is ago? I don't know. Uh-huh. Like most, it's prepositional in nature, but it's not a preposition. So in other words, like you say, like we went to the movie before she did. We went to the movie after she did. But then it's like you have a go and it can't be used before anything.

It could only be used after time expressions. Historically, it comes from a preposition a and like a gone. Yeah. Yeah. So what is a go? Well, oh, it's a gone. Yeah. Yeah. So wadzi is a go. Well, oh, it's a prepositional phrase. That's what it is. And it was short.

Wa wadzi. Means before now. So technically it's an adverb. Okay. So we used it as a reduction of before now. Oh, okay. Okay. And then of course, wa is something that derives ultimately from I.

Like your I. Your I. And it's a reduction of at the I of, and then it's been reduced. So it was reduced from un hua ti to un hua and then that just kind of disappears to hua she was 12 when it happened that was what i was remembering so the nine moons that was pretty clear but she was 12 when it happened in english right if you want to give somebody's age you say they were x right in different languages you, you say something different. So, you know, tengo 43 años. I am 43 years old. That's literally, I have 43 years. And like high Valyrian, you say, I have seen 43 years. And so then we needed some sort of expression to say that she was 12 when it happened, which is a very complex phrase. I'm pretty sure that Jesse came up with that. This is what literally is.

Yeah. So instead of like saying you are 12 or she was 12, we decided to make it a phrase that boils down to, you would say she had walked for 12 years at that time. So we had a lot of metaphorical imagery built into some of the phrases and words that we had created about, you know, the sand and movement on it and walking through it. And so we had decided to use that to say someone was 12 years to say you had walked for 12 years. Yeah. years to say you had walked for 12 years. Yeah. So you didn't work with the actors, but did some of them have, did you learn that some of them were, were, were having more difficulty or, or with it, or did they ever have to have you like, you know, like, Hey, somebody has a question for you? Well, I could tell by their performances that some of them had difficulty. I will, who nailed it? Oh, I, well, one thing i was a little surprised by so um i record the dialogue for all our productions and i i generally record it the same way which is i i record the

line exactly as it's supposed to be read then i do do it slow, then I do the English. The request came through that Timothee Chalamet specifically asked to only have the slow version in the English, which I'd never gotten that request before. Because when it's done slowly, it's done without really pacing, without the intonation., I don't know, just this line, but you're afraid what if he could be the one, you know, regular speed. Like that, right? But then the slow one. Like that. So it's very clear how everything is pronounced. But, you know, usually I would say most actors use both. He only wanted the slow version. You comply with that. And just we sent it on. I was very impressed with how he did it, especially the last scene. It was done very well. It was pronounced very well, which that part, I guess, is less surprising since he only had the slow version to work with. But also the flow of it was very good

and very impressive. And so it's like, well, yeah, you perform like that. You get it whatever way you want. So, David, we talked about six years ago, and I was wondering, like, in those years, has the field changed? I mean, is there more demand for constructed languages now, or is it basically like the same as it was back then? The pandemic changed a lot of stuff and the writer's strike changed a lot of stuff. I will say something I think that has steadily increased is the amount of productions that could have a created language do. In other words, if this is like 2008, let's say that there's 25 productions that could possibly have a created language, maybe one of them would. If you round that and say today there's 25 productions that could have a created language, I would say it's probably like eight that do. And that's a massive increase percentage-wise.

That I think has in general been a success. And I think that what that says is production knows that it's a possibility. And that's great. So are you both are you are you satisfied with the amount of your work that remained in the final cut of the film? Yes. Yes. Yes. And I and listen, I mean, something when we say it, because most more often than not, that answer is no. More often than not, our work is cut to the bone. Paper Girls is a great example of that.

Paper Girls is a show on Amazon. We really love the language we created for it. We translated a bunch of stuff for it. Our material can be heard in like a staticky radio transmission for a couple seconds in the first episode. And that's it. Never occurs in the rest of the episodes. And we weren't credited for our work. You know, that's obviously worst case scenario, I think. Well, I guess worst case would be it didn't show up at all. I don't know. But by the way, if we can give a shout out, a friend of ours, Jake Penny, created an entire

language for Madam Web, which just came out. Whole thing was cut and Jake was not credited. So that was a real, real bummer. It happens. And when David says, you know, like we're happy with it, it's also a level of understanding the scope of how much we had thought might make it in. Because, for instance, I was really happy with how much of the language that we created for Elemental showed up in Elemental, given the fact that it was a kid show, given the fact that it was animation. And even just having words scattered here and there was really satisfying in terms of understanding the scope of the project. What we saw in Dune was so far beyond that in terms of how much is in there. And what made me happiest was that there were definitely entire conversations that you could see from a director point of view at some point could have been easier just to say, you know, actors speaking in the language that doesn't get subtitled, but you hear them in the background like murmuring and it's in the language.

And so all of those decisions to have so much of the language represented, that was just beyond incredible. It was it was really amazing. Yeah, it's really saying something when it's like the lion's share of what you translate for production actually shows up. And then not only that, you translate stuff that wasn't called for and that shows up too. It was really something that we could be quite proud of. Well, it's interesting because there's been a lot of coverage about why Dune 2 has gotten such a warm reception and i think that a lot of a lot of people are yearning for like a smarter more complicated serious adult sci-fi that's been a reaction to a lot of what's come out in recent years hopefully that would also mean that a lot of people are going to be watching

this constructed language with subtitles and be like yes that's also what we want more of too we hope so yeah that'd be nice. You're like, I'm not counting on it. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to David and Jesse Peterson and everyone we heard in the 2018 episode. If you'd like to hear more episodes about Dune, in 2017, I did an episode called The Book of Dune, where I talked with Muslim fans of the series about the way that Frank Herbert incorporated aspects of Islam into the Fremen culture. And in 2021, I did an episode called The Ecology of Dune, where I looked at the environmental messages in the book

and how Frank Herbert would fit in to today's contemporary environmental movement. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts. That helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get either free imaginary World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon, and you can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.