Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Creator / David J. Peterson

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/2_73.jpg

David J. Peterson (born January 20, 1981 in Long Beach, California) is an American language creator, writer and YouTuber.

He is best known for having a near-monopoly on the field of conlangs for TV and film, like Anthony Burgess once had. He is also one of the founders of the Language Creation Society and served as its president.

Shows David J. Peterson worked on:

Movies he worked on:

Video games he worked on:

Books he worked on:

  • The Zaanics Deceit (2014) and The Zaanics Pursuit (2017): Væyne Zaanics

Books he wrote:

  • The Art of Language Invention (2015)
  • Create Your Own Secret Language: Invent Codes, Ciphers, Hidden Messages, and More (2020)

Other media he worked on:

  • The opera Lampedusa (2019): Vōv
  • The musical WeCameToDance (2021): Hanyana

Other media he created:

  • The YouTube series The Art of Language Invention (2015 - 2018)
  • The livestream series LangTime Studio and the podcast LangTime Chat (2020 -) (together with Jessie Peterson)

His creations provides examples of:

  • Adaptation Deviation: Some of his conlangs built upon words invented by other authors are quite different from what the original works featured, for instance his take on Sangheili doesn't have the games' famous wort, the closest thing it has is warut'o. This often happens when the original material is too inconsistent or when the studio doesn't think the product sounds exotic enough.
  • Adaptation Expansion: Several of his conlangs weren't functional in the works the shows featuring them were adapted from, their authors just invented a few words before Peterson turned them into more elaborate languages.
  • All There in the Script: He often shares the scripts he translated and the pronunciation guides he made for the actors, these are generally the only public sources of information about his conlangs aside from the questions he answers on Tumblr, unless there's a lot of interest in a creation in particular.
  • Alternate Number System: Some of his creations use uncommon bases, for instance Indojisnen uses base 7.
  • Always Someone Better: He answered to a fan who called him the world's best conlanger that Sylvia Sotomayor is the one who deserves this title rather than him.
  • Anachronism Stew: Kezhwa is a creole spoken by time travelers whose vocabulary is borrowed from a variety of languages from different time periods.
  • Artificial Script: Many, often full of confusing irregularities because of the evolution of the languages they're used to write.
  • Black Speech:
    • Verbis Diablo is quite literally the language of the Devil. It can only be learned through Black Magic, normal humans end up insane if they try.
    • Nelvayu is the language of the Eldritch Abomination Dormammu.
    • As the Omec are the other Votan races' worst nightmare and even the source of their words for "demon", Kinuk'aaz is the Votan equivalent.
  • Classical Tongue: High Valyrian, which is only spoken by erudites and aristocrats in-universe.
  • Common Tongue: Castithan was an in-universe example before the Votans left their planets, the Castithans were the most powerful race and their language was used in the entire Votanis system as the international language of trade.
  • Complexity Addiction: He intentionally made the Övüsi script an in-universe example, it's ridiculously, illegibly ornate to match the elves' pomposity.
  • Creator Backlash:
    • He admits he regards many of his early (as in pre-Dothraki) creations as terrible, especially his first conlang Megdevi. However, he's willing to share them anyway to show beginners how not to create a conlang.
    • He chose to give the Dothraki word khaleesi the pronunciation /ˈxa.le.e.si/ ("KHAH-lay-ay-see"), but he now regards this decision as a mistake since everyone instead uses the incorrect English pronunciation /kaˈlisi/ ("kah-LEE-see") based on the spelling.
    • He dislikes how Noalath sounds because he realized too late that the consonant mutation rules he devised resulted in constant postalveolar consonants (the sounds spelt with ch, j, sh and zh in English).
    • He doesn't like talking about his involvement in Penny Dreadful and Lovecraft Country because working on those shows was a bad experience for him.
  • Creator Couple: He has worked on several shows with his wife Jessie, most notably Motherland: Fort Salem.
  • Creator's Favorite: He was amazed by Jacob Anderson's performance in Astapori Valyrian and still considers it the best performance ever achieved in one of his creations.
  • Creator's Favorite Episode: He regards High Valyrian, Irathient and Munja'kin as his best conlangs.
  • Cunning Linguist: Downplayed, the only languages he claims to be fluent in are English and Spanish, though he has also studied dozens of other languages to some extent.
  • Does Not Like Spam: He famously hates onions so much he wrote a rant against them in his book The Art of Language Invention:
    No, I’m sorry, I can’t let this go. Why would anyone ever eat an onion or include it in food? Onions taste bad. Furthermore, they’re the culinary equivalent of multiplying by zero: add onion to any food, and it now tastes like nothing but onion. In conclusion, onions are bad. Stop using them.
  • Everything Sounds Sexier in French: He deliberately made Sondiv and Aazh Naamori sound like French for this reason.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Many of his conlangs, usually because their speakers are written as such. The languages of Shadow and Bone even contain some words from existing languages such as Russian because Leigh Bardugo borrowed them.
  • Foreigners Write Backwards: Generally averted because of technical constraints, unfortunately. However, some of his scripts such as Indojisnen's are designed to be writable in several directions.
  • Forgetful Jones: He admits he often forgets details about his own creations because he forgets to take notes:
    I’m actually not 100% clear why there’s variability... I can’t remember what I did. Based on the other table, I think the form vüb- is used for reflexives, but the form vün- is used for two different third person animate arguments. It could be the other way around... Man. I don’t remember what source I used for reflexives. I’m sure I wrote it down somewhere, but I can’t find it. [...] Notice how I say "for its reflexive form, it causes no mutation" but I don’t say which one is the reflexive form! I have to think it’s the b form, but I can’t say for certain. [...] I’m going to guess it’s that b/o form that’s reflexive, but that’s just an educated guess, since like an idiot I didn’t write this down. Ugh.
  • God-Created Canon Foreigner: He created the Shiväisith alphabet after Thor: The Dark World came out and never meant it to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's canon.
  • He Also Did: He's the singer of the band Kaduatán. Fittingly, he sings in a conlang, John Quijada's Ithkuil.
  • Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Several of his conlangs are constructed in-universe by characters for this purpose. An extreme example is Væyne Zaanics, which is only known to one person per generation.
  • High-Tech Hexagons: The glyphs of Indojisnen's script Hazugimari have hexagonal shapes, fitting the Indogenes' advanced science and technology.
  • Japanese Politeness: Castithan uses an alien equivalent.
  • Language Drift:
    • He does this deliberately to obtain highly realistic languages with believable quirks.
    • Several of his creations, such as the descendants of High Valyrian, are in-universe examples. Some like Azrán (a descendant of Mexican Spanish) descended from real-world languages, averting Eternal English.
  • Language Equals Thought:
    • Mag Nuk, the language of giants in Game of Thrones, is a very simplified version of the Old Tongue in which every word has become monosyllabic because of the giants' limited intelligence.
    • Conversely, Indojisnen is too complex for non-Indogenes to speak because of the Indogenes' superhuman intelligences.
  • Language of Magic: Several, such as Inha, the language of the Ozian witches.
  • Line to God: He's quite active on Tumblr, where he answers questions about his conlangs.
  • Motor Mouth: Castithan and Övüsi were designed to be spoken very quickly.
  • Natural Elements: The 4 classical elements are a recurring theme in his creations, his wife's and the ones they made together, they're especially fond of gender systems based on them rather than on sex.
  • Nerds Speak Klingon: Averted, he stated he has no interest in learning how to speak his own conlangs or someone else's.
  • Official Fan-Submitted Content: He sometimes canonizes fan-made words, especially the ones Trigedasleng's fans come up with.
  • Our Angels Are Different: He made Lishepus for the angels in Dominion.
  • Our Elves Are Different: He made several languages for elves, both the good and the evil kinds, and even Christmas Elves.
  • Our Orcs Are Different: He also made several languages for orcs.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: And Aazh Naamori for the vampires in Vampire Academy.
  • Our Witches Are Different: As well as several for witches.
  • Pardon My Klingon: He created many, many dirty words for the most profanity-laden shows he worked on.
  • Primordial Tongue: Some of his creations are their respective worlds' first languages, for example Méníshè, whose name translates as "mother tongue", is the root of all human languages in Motherland: Fort Salem.
  • Promoted Fanboy: Several instances, most notably when he was hired to work on the movie Warcraft and the show Emerald City, as he's a huge fan of both World of Warcraft and the Oz book series.
  • Punctuation Shaker: Completely averted, he stated he hates this trope, and his languages only use apostrophes when there's a good reason to use them.
  • Shout-Out: Subtle references are hidden in the vocabularies of many of his conlangs, for instance the High Valyrian word for "chain" is belmon.
  • Shown Their Work: His creations are among the most realistic languages ever invented thanks to the elaborate history he creates for most of them.
  • Single Language Planet: His alien languages are generally the only languages spoken on their planets, because the writers said so. Averted in his personal creations' lore, which involves multilingual worlds.
  • Starfish Language: Some of his personal creations qualify, such as Experiment J, which uses jelly beans rather than speech, signs or writing.
  • Time-Travel Tense Trouble: Averted in Kezhwa, the language of time travelers in Paper Girls: it has a nonpresent, which the speakers use to refer to both past and future since the difference doesn't matter to them.
  • Translation Convention: The reason why Ravkan is rarely heard and mainly appears in writing and Kerch only appears in writing (and isn't actually a conlang): the main characters of Shadow and Bone speak these languages, so they're usually translated into English, unlike Fjerdan, Zemeni and Shu.
  • Translation: "Yes": He sometimes invents words that are a lot longer than their English translations, a notable example he wrote a post about on Tumblr is passajamanasos, which is Shiväisith for "prepared".
  • Tuckerization: He coins some words after friends, relatives and pets of his:
    • Many of his creations have a word coined after his first wife Erin.
    • His cat Keli is a recursive example, as her name comes from his conlang Kamakawi and he coined several words in subsequent creations after her.
  • Uncredited Role: Sometimes, either because his contributions were small or, unfortunately, because the clients forgot.
  • The Unpronounceable: Some of his creations arguably qualify, what with the unusual phonemes or complex consonant clusters found in them, for instance "they always give them to you" in Bodzvokhan is khngrbǝzninǝd.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • He shared several unused conlang sketches he made for some shows before it was decided not to develop them, for example he made one the White Walkers were meant to speak, but the showrunners chose to make them Silent Antagonists instead. He also created sketches of writing systems that weren't developed, the art departments used gibberish instead.
    • Some of his creations were barely used in the final products as most of the lines were cut, and in one case, all of them were when it was decided to make the Children of the Forest speak English after he was hired to create their language and finished translating the lines.
    • The Orcish language he created for Warcraft was originally Truer to the Text, but the producers had him do it all over again because they felt it didn't sound "orcish" enough.
    • He worked on the pilot of Dawn, a show set in prehistory, but it wasn't picked up.
    • Similarly, he worked on the pilot of Bloodmoon, one of the planned prequels of Game of Thrones, but the project was canceled because HBO was dissatisfied with the pilot and decided to greenlight House of the Dragon instead.
    • He was contacted by the makers of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and His Dark Materials but they chose other conlangers, presumably because they couldn't afford him.
    • He turned down working on various projects for various reasons, they sometimes hired other conlangers, for instance Trent Pehrson ended up working on Star Trek: Picard because Peterson wasn't interested and recommended him instead.
    • Pixar consulted him for Onward but didn't end up hiring a conlanger. He's nevertheless credited in the special thanks section.
  • Wingdinglish:
    • Generally totally averted, but Kerch is an intentional example as he was hired to only create its script without a conlang, everything written in Kerch is just English in his font.
    • Examples he had no control over are unfortunately found in several shows and movies he worked on, as their art departments were too lazy to use his scripts properly and just wrote English with them.
  • WorldBuilding: To invent believable words and expressions, he spends quite a lot of time thinking about the speakers' culture and how they would say something. In some cases, his ideas even influenced the writers he worked with.
  • Wrote the Book: Literally, his book The Art of Language Invention is one of the most recommended resources for learning how to conlang.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top