Imeimei

How about right now?

This is all (and I mean ALL) the dialogue Jessie and I were asked to translate for Supergirl. This is the biggest single project Jessie and I have ever worked on. We did…everything—including original lyrics for a song that I wrote about my cat.

Incidentally, we were also so snowed under with work that we had to split things up. I did two of the new languages (Bíeki and Iskwari) and Jessie did one (Ud Briggan). (Separately, Jessie also totally soloed two other projects at the same time, boteh of which are yet to be revealed.) Also we were massively sick, on set in Leavesden. And we were staying at a hotel that literally had these statues:

I don't know what to do with this information, so I'm sharing it with everyone I know. Why are they like that? Why is every muscle tensed?! Why are the columns bending?! Just...filled with questions…

I currently trying to learn more of High Valyrian. I was wondering if you have an active community. I am aware of the existence of Discord community, but unfortunately I cannot find an active invite link.

Here’s one:

The latest conlang dialogue for House of the Dragon. Many, many years ago—some time in 2012—I was creating the verb system of High Valyrian. I knew that High Valyrian was going to have verb roots that end in nearly every short vowel—a, e, i, o, and u, but not y—and a consonant. As I was creating the verb system, I needed roots that ended in each vowel to test out, as my examples. Sindigon "to buy" was my i-root. Ropagon "to fall" was my a-root. And for u? I created ēdrugon "to sleep".

More than ten years later, I need a word for "dream", and the word that makes the most sense is ēdrurys. With both of the r's being trills, I thus created one of the worst words in the history of worddom to pronounce.

And on this episode Emma D'Arcy had to pronounce it.

Hats off to them. They approached it with gusto and somehow managed to get through it. I don't know how many takes it took, but it came out. Heck of a job. Well done.

And all because I needed a root that ended in u…

It could have been ēdugon, for all it mattered. Would've been far easier to pronounce. But I thought with the consonant cluster it would warrant the vowel-final root—and the [r] would make the [u] more likely. It made sense. But what a bear... I had to pronounce it myself for the recording, of course, so I know, and, trust me, it's no easier for me.

Today is the third episode of House of the Dragon, so for fun I thought I’d do a post of the dragon names for all the dragons we’ve seen thus far in High Valyrian (both in the orthography and in the romanization). In the writing itself there are many ways to spell names, so the spellings you see here are just those that I decided on for this post; they’re not the only possible spellings for each dragon.

First is Arrax (Arraks) whose name is built off the glyph used in arrigon, which means “to show” or “to display”. Arrax’s (Arraks’) name doesn’t necessarily derive from this word, but it’s close enough that it can be spelled with that glyph. The last glyph is a special glyph for names that end in -x (-ks).

Next Balerion, the Black Dread. The bal- portion of the name comes from the glyph for soil balon. Next is the glyph for repetition commonly used in participles. This word isn’t necessarily a participle, but that glyph is used when there’s a -Vr extender in a name (cf. Daenerys, Jaehaerys, etc.). The last glyph is the glyph for iron āegion, which is used for the -ion ending. Both the glyphs for soil and iron imply darkness, chosen in part due to Balerion’s black scales.

Sheepstealer’s name you will have heard several times this season. The name is a direct translation, with the first glyph for bianor “sheep”, and the second two glyphs being laodio, an older word for “thief” (the more common word is laodikio). To form a compound, bianor reduces to its second stem, biādr-, which then assimilates to the following l, giving us biāllaodio.

Seasmoke’s (Embrōrbar’s) name is a standard compound. The first glyph is embar “sea” and the second ōrbar “smoke”. To combine the two, embar changes to its genitive embro, and then it merges with ōrbar. The name is literally “smoke of the sea”.

Silverwing’s (Gēliotīkun’s) name is also a direct translation of the common. Gēlio is the genitive of gēlion “silver”, and tīkun is the word for “wing”. The first two glyphs give us gēlio and the second two tīkun. It’s literally “wing of silver”.

Another Common Tongue name is Moondancer (Hūrlilio). This is less obvious in High Valyrian, as the root for moon hūra is used smashed onto the word for dancer lilio. The first glyph is the glyph of the moon; the second the glyph for dancing; and the last a glyph that gives us -io, Valyrian equivalent of -er.

The name of the great Caraxes (Karakses) derives from the Valyrian word for great kara. Following that initial glyph is the special x (ks) glyph seen in Arrax (Arraks). The last glyph is the dragon glyph which gives us the -es ending.

Meleys (Meles) is a much simpler name. The name derives from mele “red”, which uses the same glyph as the glyph for a rose. The last glyph is the dragon glyph which gives us -es.

Syrax (Sȳraks) is Rhaenyra’s yellow dragon, and its name derives from sȳz “good”. In its modified forms, the root of sȳz is sȳr-, and so when it combines with the -x (-ks) glyph it’s Sȳraks, not Sȳzaks.

The old god Vhagar (Vagar) lends its name to this dragon. As an old god, the name has many spellings, and its old pronunciation has been lost. This time I spelled it with the consonantal glyphs V, H, and G with the blood glyph giving us the -ar ending. Whatever the V and H were supposed to represent has been lost to time, but the H will stick around in the spelling as a vestige of the old god’s name.

The name Vermax (Vermaks) is a combination of the glyph used in vermagon “to warn” and the -x (-ks) terminal glyph.

Vermithor (Vermitor) is another old name which has many spellings. In this instance, I used the same glyph as with Vermax (Vermaks), added a consonantal T, and used the shadow glyph to give us the -or ending.

Finally we have the Common Tongue name Sunfyre (Vēsperzys). This is a simple compound, with the sun glyph vēzos being sandwiched onto the front of perzys “fire”, similar to the moon glyph in Moondancer (Hūrlilio). The z of vēzos assimilates to the following p of perzys, devoicing to s.

Thank you! I use two programs—one of which is slightly embarrassing: FontLab 8 and Keynote. Keynote is a native Mac application that's the equivalent to Windows' PowerPoint. >.< I was never very good at using actual graphics applications like Photoshop or Gimp. Keynote, of course, is not actually intended for real graphic design, so it doesn't have a lot of features, but it has enough to do what I want to do, most of the time.

So we have these eight flags:

The actual detail parts are all done in FontLab. They're a part of a large font I use for the icons in the board game we're working on, with each icon assigned to a keystroke or combination of keystrokes. You can see some of the bits here:

Then if you actually click in to one (e.g. the mouse charge) it looks like this:

All of this is literally copy and paste, drag and drop, and math. FontLab does have some very useful basic automations built into it (e.g. removing overlapping bits so they become the same layer) and some more advanced ones that I've occasionally found useful. For example, for the rabbits, I designed this:

This was designed by hand (and based on a hand-written version by my friend Barry Garcia!), but I wanted it to look a little rougher, so I used the distort feature, which you can modify via two metrics: wavelength and force:

That produced this:

And that's what's used here:

Then for actually putting flags together, Keynote is wonderful. The beaver flag here:

Is actually just stacked elements:

And you can actually do quite a bit with element stacking. This whole thing was designed using Keynote:

My wife Jessie did the rabbit drawings, but everything else is little shapes with fills done in Keynote. (Note: I also used Gimp to erase everything outside the yellow circle.) It's not good for everything, but for this I wanted something that kind of evoked old style travel posters, so I think it worked for that.

It's my 14 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

https://archiveofourown.org/works/87170256

A new season and a new round of Valyrian dialogue up on my AO3. Here's to a good season!