The language creator then back-fitted the made up gibberish into the language.
Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.
However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of the things that was great about, for example, the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).
Similarly, the video game Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."
Interesting tidbit! I had thought they were all artificial.
But the moment you start using existing language in a new context, you get into issues. You've got words and whole concepts missing that you have to add to something that's more or less complete.
Dothraki needs horse-related words. You need to be able to express certain social concepts that are unique to this fantasy culture.
So you set up to build this words and phrases. You derive phonotactics of a real language and patch it with your stuff. Now you've got new language based on an existing one. So you didn't preserve anything. And if I were a user of the originl lang, I'd be upset you appropriated and twisted it.
[1] https://www.player.one/far-cry-primal-interview-how-ubisoft-...
John Kani, a veteran South African actor playing King T'Chaka in the Marvel movies "Captain America: Civil War" and "Black Panther", decided to speak the Wankandan language parts in Xhosa, a South African language that he is a native speaker of. He taught the rest of the cast their lines. I think it sounded realistic.
https://www.thesouthafrican.com/john-kani-influenced-the-bla...
https://qz.com/1192662/black-panther-wakandas-language-is-is...
A lot of those people are proud of their language and would like to see it live and thrive again.
https://reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8wjs73/is_there_a_cit...
Bonus points if it's sold as random fantasy language of a strange country and the main cast doesn't understand it either.
(He also briefly talks about the Vulcan language at the beginning.) What's interesting here is that he was brought in for the third Star Trek movie. But there was already a small amount of spoken Klingon in the first movie, created by James Doohan. So Okrand, while he was tasked with actually inventing the language, felt constrained by continuity. He discusses trying to rationalize the preexisting bits and then extend the language coherently.
(And his enthusiasm is really clear. It's fun to listen to someone smart talk about something they're really excited by.)
David Salo is a Tolkien scholar who was brought onto the film team to help expand some of Tolkien's conlangs for use in the film. While his work isn't strictly "canonical," he did do a lot of serious work to make his additions fit into what fragments we have. His blog is a good read: https://midgardsmal.com/
Yes, Dothraki being an actual language is probably "better" than Leia speaking gibberish to Jabba, but to me it feels like it's way past the point of diminishing returns.
to push even further, how would one imagine an alien language where the organisms do not speak through mouth-like organs? what if they made noises through all their pores in their skin? or non-auditory communication like colour coded messages in their eyes? what if aliens had no mouth or eyes in the first place? or skin? what if aliens spoke in methods that did not require passage of time... i.e. the entire message flash out in a single packet of information? I guess these methods of communication wouldn't allow a story to be told in a way that is familiar to typical human story telling and would thus be uninteresting. but would be nice to imagine regardless.
That's the basic plot of Arrival.
Khuzdul (the Dwarves' language in The Lord Of The Rings) is not well fleshed out, but was somewhat inspired by Semitic languages, in so far as it had tri-consonantal roots.
Klingon was created by a guy well versed in Native American language, and I think I recall reading was somewhat inspired by Inuit's agglutinative grammar.
Oh, and Laadan, an attempt at a conciously different perspective in language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Láadan
I've read SF works in which light-based and even scent-based languages are posited. Authors don't always use this as anything other than background color in their universe, though.
Created for the book by Nick Farmer with the authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, he then coached the actors and extended the language for the TV show.
Here's something from wired on that creation process: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-expanse-belter-language/
This is also fun, Belter Creole words and their origins: http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books)
pretty cool, sa-sa ke?
The community is also fascinating, with folks spending passionate decades on making languages - ex: ithkuil.
Hey, my linguistics degree had to be good for something.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
Yes, most words were inspired form existing English words. The caesar transformation words were mostly transformed from English words, some using Indonesian, some Arabic, some Latin.
I tried not to create a whole new word, instead the idea of adopting some words from existing language were a common practice on any language that we have now, so I tried to adopt whenever possible and change the pronounciation.
Here's an example of some words that was not adopted from an existing language (or if there was similarities, it wasn't my intention): - Vragel (soul) - Serentia (eternal) - Rus, Erus, Berus (the suffix used to implicate negativity, rus is least negative, erus is mid, berus is the most negative; e.g Vragelberus (to indicate a highly damaged, wicked, dangerous, or corrupted soul).
There's also some rule I used to create/adapt words, words that indicates greatness or something big always ends with the letter "A". E.g. Versila (universe), Elia (god), Alua (sky), Titania (giants), Manara (tower).
Name of places in the book also follows this rule. E.g Riddorana (place of huge waterfall), Zodiarchia (capital city), Altand (small ponds, note it doesn't end with an "A").
This rule allowed me to write poets that easily ended with the letter "A".
It is always interesting to learn words from existing language, then adopt it and learn how to make it fit with the existing language design.
I think you mean “vowel”, not “vocal”.
There is a lot of attention to detail, probably including a fair bit that doesn't make it on camera, in big budget video/film productions. You could probably cut a lot of it and still have a "pretty good" final product. But being obsessive about detail rather than being content with good enough in all sorts of aspects of production, including the acting, is one of the things that separate competent shows from really good ones.
I often wonder what would happen if you applied startup principles to making a movie. Thinking in terms of MVP, customer value, efficiency, on top of the artistic vision. This is not just talk, I'm putting my ideas to practice by producing two zero-budget feature films with an extremely lean mentality. Let's see how they turn out :)
As long as everything goes up this is fine.
When things start to get flat, money will dry up.
Plus, once you have a language, you can translate an English script into it vs constantly making up (inconsistent) foreign dialogue as you go.
For an extreme example, think Transformers, where hundreds of millions and dollars can't save bad writing. Making things better at the screenplay level is probably much more cost-effective than spending millions in VFX (or, in this case, creating a full language where subtitled not-entirely-random gibberish would probably do)
The box office result says otherwise.
(Note: I'm explicitly making an economical argument, not an artistic one, since that's what the thread focuses on.)
Certainly there are good "little" movies that get made on a relative shoestring. And even more shorts and arthouse fare. And modern video equipment makes it a lot easier to mostly use natural lighting and the like.
That said, mainstream TV and movies have made most of our standards pretty high. I'm always somewhat amazed by how much gear gets brought in by a video crew to shoot a few minutes of talking heads to use on a company web site.
I feel similar with history, if I am just doing it for entertainment I'd much rather learn a constructed history rather than the real one.
Whether you take Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for granted or you think that its inverse is true, cultures and languages codevelop.
You wouldn't say "keep them at the bay" in a language used by a land-locked people. You won't call tomato "pomodoro" if gold in your area doesn't have impurites that make it red and not yellow.
You have to understand that language on a very basic level is a construct of a culture that used it. You can't separate them.
And then there are practical reasons. You won't get actors to learn Mongolic language to play Dothraki. Conlangs aim to combine "alien" with "familiar" which is a must in a movie, game or a book.
If you mean to reference the expression “keep someone at bay” (no “the”) with the meaning of holding them back, that comes from “bay” as in “the howling bark of hounds” rather than “bay” as in “a partially enclosed body of water attached to a larger area”. Completely separate etymology (from old French «bay» and «baie», respectively, ending up in words that happen to be spelled the same in English.)
So, a fine idiom for a landlocked people, not so good for a people without dogs.
Why would actors learn a language when they can just learn their lines? If you're already borrowing concepts from other languages why not the whole thing. I don't know if conlangs are better, but I don't think it would be unethical to use an existing ancient language for a movie or TV show.
Much of the approach is explained in the DVD extras to the film, but is summarised on the film's Wikipedia[0].