Khalakka Haji Winterfell

Well, there was some Dothraki in Episode 8 originally, but given that we only got one scene from Dany’s storyline, I have a feeling the lines (and the accompanying scene) were pushed back to either next week or the week after. We shall see.

In this episode, we see Robb and Talisa kind of coming full circle (I imagine it’ll probably fully play out over the next two episodes). I’ll have more to say when the season’s over, but I can return to a point I was trying to make in a previous post now that one of the events I was alluding to has played out. (Note: If you haven’t watched the most recent episode yet, now would be a good time to navigate away from the site. I did say early on that everything that’s aired is fair game, so fairly warned be ye says I!)

As I mentioned, George R. R. Martin does this thing in the Song of Ice and Fire books where something happens and the explanation isn’t revealed until later. In A Clash of Kings, for example, the reader is led to believe that Bran and Rickon are dead: killed by Theon. It’s a number of chapters later that we find out that the corpses are those of the miller’s sons, and that they were dipped in tar and disfigured so that they would be unrecognizable. The order of the revelation of these facts allows the reader to experience what the rest of the Northmen experience in the book. This was preserved in the show (because it could be: the episode break provided a convenient way to allow the audience to fret over the deaths of Bran and Rickon while not cruelly putting an entire season in between the ruse and the revelation), but similar events (such as the one I was referring to in the previous post) could not be.

This episode had possibly one of my favorite Arya moments: Her shrugging her shoulders when Jaqen H’ghar suggests she’s less than honorable. Priceless. Maisie Williams is just terrific.

Since there’s nothing else going on, I wanted to spotlight some excellent tutorials on Dothraki on YouTube. They’re all being done by YouTube user sunquan8094, and I have no idea who he is (in fact, I don’t think any of the Dothraki.org folk know who he is, either). Some of the early videos have a couple of minor errors, but in style and content, I think they serve as an excellent introduction to Dothraki. The most recent video was posted a week ago, so I believe sunquan8094 plans to keep on making them, which is fantastic!

Unfortunately, the videos haven’t gotten a lot of exposure and have very few views. In addition, it looks like some gregi is being totally uncool and hitting “dislike” on all of them, so I’m hoping we can fix that. All the videos that are up at the moment are linked below. If you have a YouTube account (or even if you don’t), go hit “like” on all of them so we can get the videos back in the green and give sunquan8094 a little encouragement!

[Note: The playlist that houses all the videos can be found here.]

For those in the Bay Area, I’m going to be doing a Song of Ice and Fire panel at BayCon this coming Sunday (11:30 a.m., Ballroom A). Stop by, and I’ll give you a free M’athchomaroon! Otherwise, I’ll see you all here next week to discuss “Blackwater” (the one we’ve all been waiting for).

10 comments

  1. Things have been quiet here, and there may be a good reason. The server that supports both the Na’vi speakers community and much of the Dothraki speakers’ community underwent a catastrophic failure over the weekend. At the present, the ‘co-olocated’ server is being retrieved for repair by ‘Marki’, the system administrator for both of these communities. It is expected that these sites will be down for 1-2 weeks. The good news is that Marki does not believe any data has been lost. So, when things are back up and running, it should be like nothing happened.

    During the outage, I have an up-to-date dictionary which you can request if you need one. It was updated just before the failure.

    David, I would love to join you at Baycon this coming Sunday. But I am not going to be able to leave town for the memorial day weekend as I will be covering for the rest of my department at work, who have all decided (before I could) to ditch town for the holiday weekend. vos athdavrazar :-(

    1. Aw, man! They ditched you, zhey Hrakkar! Not cool. :( I’ll be thinking of you.

      I never understood why the Learn Na’vi folks didn’t take advantage of the free space offer from the LCS. We don’t have server problems.

  2. The Na’vi site (and the Dothraki site, for that matter) are a lot more than a simple webpage. There is a forum, which on LN is extensive, and very active. there is a wiki, a Minecraft server, a database server (which supports the dictionaries and on the Na’vi side, a number of other things), an IRC server, and I think, a Teamspeak server. There are also 3,000+ photos and other similar media on the server. Although the Dothraki side has many of these same elements, they aren’t nearly as active. Besdies all this, there are several other developmental projects underway that have their own domain and environment there. We also purchased this server as a community. If the LCS server could provide all these services, perhaps you could host us.

  3. I have a question. It seems sunquan8094 always stresses the first syllable of all words. Is this so? Wasn’t it the second from last syllable?

    1. The penultimate syllable is rarely ever stressed. If a word ends in a consonant, it’s stressed on the last syllable. If it ends in a vowel, it’s usually stressed on the first syllable. Only time it’s penultimate is if the word ends in a vowel and the penultimate syllable is heavy.

      1. Hey, since the standard Dothraki has no long vowels or diphthongs and I’m under an assumption the onset does not affect syllabe weight, isn’t “the syllabe ends in consonant” in practice the same as saying the syllabe is heavy?
        So, would
        1) the stress is on the last syllabe, if it’s heavy
        2) else the stress is on penultimate syllabe, if it’s heavy
        3) If neither is heavy, the stress is on the first syllabe be a correct alternate wording for the stress rules?

        How about secondary stresses? With a lot of compound words and otherwise lengthy words, I’d imagine such a thing could emerge/matter.

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