New Bit of a Language

M’athchomaroon! We’re eight episodes into season 5 of Game of Thrones, and if you watched last night’s episode, you saw, among other things, a giant named Wun Wun—who spoke! For those wondering, yes, his utterances were linguistic (or were close, anyway), and, yes, I did create a language for the giants, though that’s all you’ll hear of it this season. In this post, I’ll give you a little background on it, but not much (I will explain why, though).

For readers of the book series, one question probably comes to mind first: Is this the Old Tongue? The answer: Kind of. I think George R. R. Martin explains it best himself (and these are words we should keep in mind throughout this post):

The giants are not literate, and, truth be told, are not all that bright either. They do speak the Old Tongue, after a fashion, but not well.

Given these marching orders, I crafted a language for the giants that fit the bill—not the Old Tongue, but Mag Nuk: The Great Tongue.

We know very little about the Old Tongue, and I was not tasked with creating it, in its purest form, so I devised a kind of rubric for deriving Mag Nuk from the Old Tongue, if it existed. The result is a pidgin, in one sense of the word. In this case, though, it’s not a pidgin because it hasn’t been spoken for very long, or because it’s a mixture of other languages: It’s a pidgin because it’s not a full language, and is not entirely consistent at any point. It’s a system of communication used by a race of creatures that simply don’t have the mental capacity of an ordinary human being, so they really took a bat to the Old Tongue.

Because I haven’t actually created the Old Tongue and we don’t know if we’ll see it in future books (or to what extent), I want to release very little about the language. I want to have as much latitude in reshaping Mag Nuk, should it be necessary, and that’s easiest to do if I keep things in house. Frankly, I think it’d be great to actually create the Old Tongue and hear it on screen, but given where we are in the story, I simply have no idea if it would even make sense. Dave and Dan might, but they haven’t told me anything about it. We’ll have to wait for more books or more seasons of the show to come out to know.

Some of the things I did with the language, though, I’ll tell you here. For example, whatever systems the Old Tongue had (noun declension, pluralization, verb tense, etc.), all of them are gone in Mag Nuk. Furthermore, all polysyllabic words have been cut down to a single syllable. In addition, the phonology of the language has been simplified. To give you one example that we can be fairly sure of, we know that skagos is “rock” in the Old Tongue. The Mag Nuk version is skag.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the line from last night’s episode as written, and then afterwards we’ll talk about what was actually said (coarse language incoming):

  • Lokh doys bar thol kif rukh?
  • “The fuck you looking at?”

(Oh, and for pronunciation, vowels are o [ɔ]; a [æ], unless it’s before r, in which case it’s [ɑ]; i [ɪ]; u [ǝ]. Then for the few consonants that might be confused, kh [x]; r [ɹ]; th [θ].)

Okay! Each of these words has an etymology, and I will list them, if you promise to treat this information as provisional! It may need to be revised at some future date if more Old Tongue words are revealed that somehow make the etymologies impossible. I’ll fix it so that the spoken Mag Nuk line will work, but I make no promises for the etymologies. Below is a word-for-word gloss of the line, and below that an Old Tongue correspondence for each word:

  • Lokh doys bar thol kif rukh?
  • Who/what fuck/shit you sit look it/him?
  • Lokh doysen bar thol kifos rukh?

You can probably figure out what I was doing grammatically there. Doys was supposed to be a general curse word (could mean anything), and lokh a general question word. The order is SVO, given the lack of inflection, but that’s not necessarily the order of the Old Tongue. The precise meanings of each of the Old Tongue words I’ll leave for later, but I did intend for the pronouns at least to hold up. We’ll see, though!

Anyway, if you go back and watch the episode, though, it’s pretty obvious that what Wun Wun says is three syllables long. What I believe (or would like to say I believe) I heard is the following:

  • Lokh kif rukh?
  • Who/what look it/him?
  • Lokh kifos rukh?

If that’s the case, I have to say, I’m pretty pleased. I think it’s actually more simple—more giant-like—than what I originally had, which is in keeping with the spirit of how George R. R. Martin described the giants’ use of the Old Tongue. It’s even less language-y than my sentence, but there’s still some meaning you can recover from it. The important bits are there. Plus, the whole point of the thing is that it’s not consistent. This is inconsistent with what I’d written, but in a good way (i.e. the three most important bits are there). So, right on!

That’s the long and short of it. We’ll have to wait and see if the language is used in any form in the future. For now, though, I like what it added to this episode. I also liked Wun Wun’s “Tormund”. Be cool to see the giants totally whaling on things at some point in time in the future of the series if there’s some truly epic Lord of the Rings-style battle-to-end-all-battles (and though we don’t have all the books, I think it’s fair to speculate that there might be before it’s all over).

Thanks for reading! Also, though I’ve announced it elsewhere, I did want to mention here that my next book The Art of Language Invention will be coming out September 29th! It’s available for preorder right now, and you can preorder the book here.

19 comments

  1. Oh, my God, we’re getting closer and closer to the Old Tongue…. :D
    I have been waiting to hear a language from Beyond the Wall for YEARS and this… sounds fricking perfect. Brilliant work, David.

    1. I did something for the Others in season 1 (cf. Skroth), but it was’t used. I expect there won’t be any discernible language for the Others in the show (which makes sense, given their physiology. Most of them wouldn’t be able to produce sounds with their mouths/lungs, to be honest).

  2. we know that skagos is “rock” in the Old Tongue. The Mag Nuk version is skag.

    Getting some germanicky vibes when the simplification is still CCVC.

  3. Surely you meant for the giants to whale rather than wail on things? ;o)

    Haven’t seen the episode yet; looking forward to the giant’s epic speech!

    As for those Old Tongue words, are those one-to-one translations of dictionary forms, or would they actually form a grammatical sentence?

    In any case, we should adopt “doys!” as an all-purpose expletive.

    1. I’m not sure if any English speakers knows it’s supposed to be “whale on” as opposed to “wail on”. I mean that seriously. Even looking it up, most people think it’s “wail on” until they look it up. I never once imagined that it was “whale on”. It doesn’t make sense. Huh. Bet it will change before too long.

      And, no, they are absolutely not a grammatical sentence. It’s just a gloss. No Old Tongue grammar yet!

  4. See, now, after this latest episode, I’m wondering what the High Valyrian is for “all men must burn”. :)

    1. We only have a transitive verb zālagon available, so I guess you could say Valar zāliksi “All men must be burnt.”

      1. That should be valar zāliks, since the collective counts as singular.

        Or if it’s “All men must burn [someone else]” (which may well be what Zokla Pryjata intended): Valar zālis.

  5. Excellent! Sorry I was in Europe for a while and got backtracked; I will update the wiki with this now.

    Btw, a thought occurs: turns out that Michele Clapton in the costumes department said that they defined six major wildling sub-groups by how they dress (she only named the Thenns as one, unfortunately). I think it’s 1 – Haunted Forest (most wildlings), 2 – Hornfoots (mountain folk, like the Lord of Bones), 3 – Frozen Shore tribes (Karsi’s group, they wear seashells from the coasts), 4 – Cave People (wear face paint), 5 – Thenns, 6 – Giants.

    Well what just hit me was that back in Season 3, Mance said that the wildling clans in his army “speak seven languages”, and the explanation you provided when asked is that the wildlings are so spread out and isolated from each other that surely, there must be many variant *dialects* of “Old Tongue”, and that Jon Snow just calls it all “Old Tongue” in the novels because he doesn’t speak it — sort of like how in Medieval Europe there wasn’t so much “Spanish” as there was “Catalan” and “Castillian”, etc.

    So I was just working on the costumes article before I read this and I realized the numbers match up: six “major wildling regional groupings”, PLUS those who can speak the Common Tongue of the Andals, makes for “seven languages”.

    All’s right with the world.

  6. Just thinking back to What Mance said and I thought of a few questions to ask. Is the Old Tongue one language or a family of languages and if so how different are they from each other? (eg welsh v Cornish, welsh v Irish, welsh v English or welsh v Hungarian) ? Also, do the Thenns have their own unrelated language? and would Ygritte speak the old tongue? – furthermore how prevalent is the common tongue beyond the wall?and finally, would the mix of languages in Mance’s army create a pidgin language or was the common tongue solely used?

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