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From NYMag’s culture blog, “Learn to Speak Dothraki and Valyrian From the Man Who Invented Them“:
Bad news, Game of Thrones fans: You are mispronouncing Daenerys’s honorific, Khaleesi. But don’t feel bad. On the HBO show, her smitten man-servant Jorah has been saying it incorrectly as well; the more accurate pronunciation should be “KHAH-lay-see,” not “ka-LEE-see.” That’s according to David J. Peterson, the language creator responsible for all of the Dothraki and Valyrian dialogue spoken on the show, and he’s driven mad every time he hears it… As the architect of the language’s grammar and pronunciation rules, he’s the only one who can correct it with authority, but he lost the battle to correct the pronunciation on the show early on. “The producers decided they liked the other way better. They probably thought most people were pronouncing it that way anyway, which is true.”
Of course, Peterson did not coin the word Khaleesi. It existed in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, along with a couple dozen others dreamed up by the author. But Thrones producers decided we needed to hear Drogo and his people speaking more extensively in their native language and searched for someone to flesh out a whole language, just as Marc Okrand did with Klingon and Paul Frommer did with Avatar’s Na’vi. Peterson, who has a masters in linguistics from the University of California–San Diego and founded the Language Creation Society, spent twelve to fourteen hours a day, every day, for two months working on the proposal that landed him the Thrones job. When he was finished, he had more than 300 pages of vocabulary and notes detailing how the Dothraki language would sound and function. “The application process favored those of us who were unemployed at the time, which I was,” Peterson laughed…
Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss credit Peterson with having come up with a lot of “really, really vile things to say in Dothraki” that they didn’t write themselves, and he has tried to top himself with the more common, bastardized version of Valyrian spoken by Kraznys. “Part of the fun doing the Low Valyrian is that I could really take a bat to pretty, proper High Valyrian. Sometimes I imagine High Valyrian being a piñata of a princess castle,” Peterson said. So far this season, Kraznys’s colorful line from episode three — “And this because I like the curve of her ass” (translated: “Si kizy vasko v’uvar ez zya gundja yn hilas”) — has gotten a big reaction online…