Here's my take as a person with two linguistics degrees, one of which had a big computational focus on historical change:
The person who constructed the languages eschewed using the literary influences because he didn't believe that the phonemic inventory would be consistent over tens of thousands of years due to prior information that we have about diachronic change in language families.
What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. So for instance, while there is a large variety of English dialects in the US, "Broadcast English" and "General American" are quite stable and broadly available.
What they've done with the constructed languages of Dune would be like if they made a new Clockwork Orange movie without any of the Nadsat dialect. It robs something from the original text, all so a hobbyist can make something internally consistent that he's personally satisfied with and that may be marketed to future consumers. That sucks.
David Peterson is paid to make languages for a living and has made many. He’s excellent at it. More importantly, he doesn’t get to do whatever he wants. Sometimes, he’s told to keep to source material, and other times he isn’t. In the end, however, he’s delivering a product to a paying customer. I met him once a linguistics conference, and he’s a sharp guy from what I gathered.
Before making claims about what he did or why he did, you should look him up. He too has degrees, but that shouldn’t make a difference. He’s created a wide variety of languages for many different projects, he founded the language creation society, and in general he gets extremely familiar with the source material for each project in which he’s involved. He’s not a huckster, and he definitely doesn’t focus on marketability of his work beyond his direct customer (though his customers may, but that ain’t on him).
He's not a huckster. I know some of the conlang crowd including him.
What he is, is obsessed with a particular idea of how realistic the process of creating conlangs must be. And in what sense that process must be realistic. Instead of creating languages that please the audience, he creates languages that please the hardcore conlang community. I get it. As a language geek the results are pleasing.
As a Dune fan he did the book and fandom a great disservice and that sucks. He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune. Sometimes realism makes something feel more real and tangible. But at other times it makes it feel pointlessly inaccessible. What's better? One kind of realism for language geeks or the integrity of the author's vision for the story? There's a clear answer for him.
You can only appreciate his work and his choices if you dig deep. And virtually no one does. Even hardcore fans.
There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it. Just like say Hebrew. Or he could declare that it became a liturgical language like Latin or Vedic Sanskrit and so remained unchanged. But that's not language geek fun.
Also his example of Beowulf is, as someone who has published many papers and also taught linguistics, just stupid. That didn't happen to Hebrew or Greek or many other languages. English went through a massive lexicon, grammar, and pronounciation shift right after it. That was an abrupt non linear change in the language. In any case, with just a little practice you can read it far better than you might think.
It's also just false that words can't be observed long periods. Reconstructions of proto-indo-european show that very likely quite a few words hardly changd.
It's really sad that so many projects are picking only him, just like countless movies pick only a few musicians for their scores. The community is large and there are a lot of curious viewpoints and ideas out there.
It's obviously a political decision to remove the Arabic from the movies, especially as it deals with religious war and extremists. The linguistic explanation is dress-up.
The Fremen in Dune are clearly inspired by Muslims but not necessarily Arabs. They are more closely modeled on Chechens. Fremen words like "sietch" and "kindjal" are from the Caucasus.
> It's obviously a political decision to remove the Arabic from the movies, especially as it deals with religious war and extremists.
Which is absolutely ridiculous given how much they've taken from MENA countries visually—the most shallow kind of appropriation when it comes to movies.
Interestingly, there is an audio-visual device being used by Paul in the first movie. Thinking Machines were destroyed (and anything like them, to a degree), but humans still needed to communicate and travel to planets. The Butlerian Jihad was not about destroying all technology.
The most devastating effect of the movement, was that most planets were largely governed by AI or less commonly cyborgs (cymeks). Rejection/Destruction of these machines left populations in utter chaos, from their managed state. Starvation, brutalism, etc. Imagine if any large country just stopped following a political and legal structure, eliminating anyone and anything who happened to support it. This was the cost of freeing humanity (according to the doctrine).
This was my thought as well. Why are we assuming they'd even have access to many preserved audio recordings knowing that they destroyed all computers? The Butlerisn Jihad was thousands of years before the events of the movie.
On the other hand, the characters in Dune have almost no information about Earth. Over the mindbogglingly long time scale between our present day and the events in the books/films, it's not only possible but likely that almost all of those audiovisual aids have been lost.
Not necessarily lost, but certainly diluted by the content produced later. The lack of AI or even sophisticated computing creates a further problem in keeping that content indexed in ways that preserve its relevance and allow it to be surfaced.
Another consideration is how suppressed previous knowledge was during the time the AI ruled over humans and how much was really lost during the Butlerian Jihad.
I'm not sure the Dune universe is fully elaborated from our days, but I would assume that every early human colony established by sleeper ships or embryo carriers would have a curated subset of human culture selected for maximising colony success. With that kind of redundancy, it'd be difficult to completely eradicate such information.
> What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. So for instance, while there is a large variety of English dialects in the US, "Broadcast English" and "General American" are quite stable and broadly available.
Is this true? I don’t think it is. Go watch or listen to some audiovisual records from not even a century ago, like a classic Hollywood film or one of the old WWII training films on YouTube for instance. If you listen for it, you will hear a dialectical drift.
Compare to Chinese, where dialects that separated a few hundred years ago are not mutually intelligible. I mean like, different Hakka dialects that arose two hundred years ago are not understandable to each other.
1800s English is Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, etc. Imagine the language changed so much you can't understand any of it
We're crossing one century of audio reproduction now, and... it really seems pretty conservative. Play a radio show from 1920's middle America and there are almost no linguistically significant changes from modern American English. Almost all the change has been superficial stuff like idioms and choice of vocabulary. No vowel shifting, no new grammar (or lost grammar), new added or removed articles or prepositions, no new ways of expressing tense.
I'm not a linguist, but over any other four generations you'd surely expect to see a lot of this stuff change.
I think it's less that they're listening to old earth recodings on arrakis and more that having high quality linguistic capture like that allows linguistic forms to persist in a way they didn't before. They're listening to audio from 100 years ago, that sound like the audio from 100 years before that...etc.
Assuming some thought was given here, I wonder if the Mandarin Chinese used by Yueh in the first movie was meant to be movie magic like with the use of English, or was there a conscious decision to keep it completely frozen over the millennia?
But then again there is the Mentat language that we hear Thufir Hawat use in the Lynch version. Has anyone bothered to analyze this and maybe expand upon it ?
>one of which had a big computational focus on historical change:
Is this by any chance the 'clock' of phonetic change in a language, and its use in predicting what an ancient language may have sounded like? I.e. Proto Indo-European? I'm a total linguistics amateur but fascinated by the field and bits of knowledge I pick up.
> What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before.
We can observe in English that this sort of effect has happened with the advent of the printed word - I've certainly read before that Shakespeare effectively codified the English language, not just by giving us lots of words and sayings, but by causing a de-facto standardisation by becoming widespread.
And while the language has moved on since then, and added a multitude of new words and phrase, the structure appears to have moved more slowly than it did before this time.
> It robs something from the original text
Eh, it's a while since I've read the original text, but Villeneuve's adaptation of part 1 left me cold anyway. It's a shame, this might be the last big-budget attempt at making a Dune movie, but to me it was hollow and dead. So if they've changed the language the Fremen speak, it's one of the lesser flaws.
"Of the Arabic excisions in the new “Dune” films, two in particular stand out. One is of jihad, Herbert’s term for the fervent crusade led by Paul Atreides with the Fremen against the oppressive interstellar regime. Herbert saw jihad as the embodiment of messianic and religious passion—a force that is socially transformative and potentially liberating, but also dangerous and to be feared: “The ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path.” Though now the word is overwhelmingly associated with Islamic extremism and terrorism, the original “Dune” offers a nuanced consideration of the concept that goes beyond simplistic and negative portrayals."
I do not think the original Dune books did not portray the jihad in a good way. It was the way that led Paul to triumph over the Imperator, but it was also the path, that lead him to burn worlds and establish a cruel theocracy. Which was only hinted at in the first books, but showed completely in Dune Messiah. Which is why many did not like it anymore as the glorious hero was dismantled.
I read all the books, and in one of the forwards by his son, he mentioned that Frank wanted to make Paul an antihero. He knew his audience wouldn't like it, but that's kind of the point of his books in the first place. Basically, you can't have nice things because that's what it means to be human.
Frank Herbert talked about this in his own words in his introduction to _Eye_ and his son talks about it in more detail in _Dreamer of Dune_. Herbert was fascinated by the power of leaders when followers aren't skeptical of them.
"Basically, you can't have nice things because that's what it means to be human."
But I would disagree to this conclusion. I rather think his goal was (among many others) to show that you cannot have nice things, when your "heros" of the culture stand for glorious war. No matter if it was a "good war" at first.
I think it's not really possible to have a black and white analysis of Paul's character, because the timescale matters - which is better explained in the books.
How could one choose between a jihad (bad on short term) and the golden path (good on very long term)? Especially if the golden path requires nasty personal sacrifices?
Paul did not like the choices he had (understandable) but can't say he was clearly a hero or an anti-hero.
Mi pensa it was rather under-used; there's tons of scenes with Beltalowda talking amongst each other in English rather than Belter. There's actually very few scenes where people talk Belter rather than English with a few Belter words mixed in.
There's obvious practical reasons for all of this, but I wouldn't call it a "gold standard".
— Oh Stewardess, I speak Belter.
He's in great pain and wants to know if you can help.
— Tili natet 'ratna. Im gonya leta-kom *mediting
detim im bek fo du to gut.
I believe Tolkien's languages remain the "gold standard", but I'm not sure if they're as productive for everyday chat and memes.
(I have heard that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda made a big mistake in not creating any swear words for Modern Hebrew, leading to a substantial overlap in comprehensible swearing between jewish and arabic communities in J'lem. That said, I understand "chinga tu madre ... cabrón" perfectly well, so probably any language communities in close contact will swear at each other perfectly comprehensibly whether they share a vocabulary or not)
I think the show struck a good balance for an English-speaking audience. We see Belters code-switch between "more Belter" with Belter-only crews to "more English" when they gather in groups with other factions or Inners. Public address systems we hear in the background are usually bilingual (Belter+English on stations, Chinese+English on Mars, etc). It feels multilingual without needing lots of subtitles.
I think it's probably the gold standard in terms of the language creation and use in television and movies. I think most, if not all, other television and movies used less of their fictional language than did The Expanse with lang belta. Lang belta permeated the show. Of course, they had to balance that with understandability, so they sprinkled lang belta. But, they sprinkled it everywhere.
They really implemented it so well into the show. Every character actually spoke it and not rehearsed the language like a lot of other shows and movies does.
Neither that, nor Klingon and the work Marc Okrand did on it.
The article is basically about Dune & Peterson, and the work he's done, especially for Dune. It's not too surprising they left off other popular conlangs.
The article mentions several other examples of fictional languages in television and movies, including Game of Thrones, and they spent some time talking about those. So, I was surprised they left of lang belta, which is a pretty well developed fictional language, probably better than any of the examples from the article.
One thing I absolutely loved about the first Dune movie was the incorporation of secret hand signals (covert sign language) from the book. The use of secret hand signal conveys the gravity and peril of the world they live in.
I really enjoyed the first Dune movie by Villenueve and decided to read Dune for the first time in anticipation the second movie.
Reading the book, I was surprised by the focus on mysticism and Islamic references, which were only a minor background element in the first movie. I do think the religious elements add depth to the story beyond the typical SciFi space opera and is a likely a strong contributing factor to Dune's enduring cultural impact. It's unfortunate the movies shied away from those references despite the potential consternation it may have stirred up.
For those that have recently read the book, this article by Harris Durrani on the probable influence of muslim theological development on Frank Herbert's Dune world is engrossing.
> A typical SciFi space opera wasn't really a thing when Herbert wrote the books.
Huh? Space opera was well established long before Dune[0]:
"Despite this seemingly early beginning, it was not until the late 1920s that the space opera proper began to appear regularly in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories.[7]: 10–18 [16] In film, the genre probably began with the 1918 Danish film, Himmelskibet.[20] Unlike earlier stories of space adventure, which either related the invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials, or concentrated on the invention of a space vehicle by a genius inventor, pure space opera simply took space travel for granted (usually by setting the story in the far future), skipped the preliminaries, and launched straight into tales of derring-do among the stars. Early stories of this type include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (Weird Tales, January 1925),[18] The Second Swarm (Amazing Stories Quarterly, spring 1928) and The Star Stealers (Weird Tales, February 1929), Ray Cummings' Tarrano the Conqueror (1925), and Edmond Hamilton's Across Space (1926) and Crashing Suns (Weird Tales, August–September 1928).[16] Similar stories by other writers followed through 1929 and 1930. By 1931, the space opera was well established as a major subgenre of science fiction.[citation needed]"
Reminds me of a woman I dated in my twenties who had invented a language while in college. She had written a few sentences on a classroom blackboard to show it to a friend but didn’t erase it. A day or two later, she showed up at a linguistics class to hear the professor and one of her classmates trying to grasp the structure of this language they had never seen before.
Science fiction is always really hard, because when you think about it, many of the cultural references of today would be baffling to people 200 years ago. But when we write a story that takes place 200 years in the future, the references can’t be baffling to the reader, first because then the story wouldn’t make sense, but also because nobody is so creative that they can invent 200 years of actual culture. So, they pretty much always use events and themes from current and past events and then re-interpret them in creative ways.
Dune is no different- and I love the book but is there another resource you can think of that is found buried in the desert that is needed for transportation that western powers fight wars over?
All fiction is anchored in "its" time to some significant degree. SF & Fantasy give the author more freedom to place a story, but as you note the author is incapable of entirely divorcing themselves from their context. Intentionally or otherwise, most fiction has allegorical elements reflecting current stories or ideas. Often this is intentional I think, with (some) authors in these genres engaging in ongoing social/political/whathaveyou issues in a way that sidesteps constraints and perspectives you would have in a "present day" setting.
I was thinking about this recently while reading the fourth book in the series and you put my thoughts into words tidily.
Tangentially, I also think the time gap between the third and fourth books (some 3,500 years) necessitated some more creativity with changes to the culture but I got the impression that the author still reused a lot of the same references despite the gap which felt kind of lazy, like humanity was just TOO stagnant for that long. That's when I started thinking that it must be a difficult endeavor to just invent a lot of new culture, especially when you've got to do service to the previous books in the series. The fifth book appears to follow the same trend despite another 1,500 years of time.
Normally I would agree on those timescales, but… the whole point of God Emperor is stultifying stasis, specifically to build up so much tension that humanity explodes outward.
So in this case “language stood still” doesn’t seem particularly out of place.
My favorite kind of sci fi is the stuff that throws you into a new world with new cultural references and doesn’t bother to explain them. Gibson is a good example. It’s a similar good feeling to getting off the train in a foreign city pre smartphone.
The languages of dune fascinated me far less than the blended religious systems.
Author copied pieces of various real world ones & they all interact and somehow it all makes sense.
If anyone came at me with a pitch involving Jesuits, Islamic jihadists and a revolution against AI I'd say that's going to get you incoherent gibberish...but somehow it works.
Readit News
The person who constructed the languages eschewed using the literary influences because he didn't believe that the phonemic inventory would be consistent over tens of thousands of years due to prior information that we have about diachronic change in language families.
What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. So for instance, while there is a large variety of English dialects in the US, "Broadcast English" and "General American" are quite stable and broadly available.
What they've done with the constructed languages of Dune would be like if they made a new Clockwork Orange movie without any of the Nadsat dialect. It robs something from the original text, all so a hobbyist can make something internally consistent that he's personally satisfied with and that may be marketed to future consumers. That sucks.
Before making claims about what he did or why he did, you should look him up. He too has degrees, but that shouldn’t make a difference. He’s created a wide variety of languages for many different projects, he founded the language creation society, and in general he gets extremely familiar with the source material for each project in which he’s involved. He’s not a huckster, and he definitely doesn’t focus on marketability of his work beyond his direct customer (though his customers may, but that ain’t on him).
What he is, is obsessed with a particular idea of how realistic the process of creating conlangs must be. And in what sense that process must be realistic. Instead of creating languages that please the audience, he creates languages that please the hardcore conlang community. I get it. As a language geek the results are pleasing.
As a Dune fan he did the book and fandom a great disservice and that sucks. He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune. Sometimes realism makes something feel more real and tangible. But at other times it makes it feel pointlessly inaccessible. What's better? One kind of realism for language geeks or the integrity of the author's vision for the story? There's a clear answer for him.
You can only appreciate his work and his choices if you dig deep. And virtually no one does. Even hardcore fans.
There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it. Just like say Hebrew. Or he could declare that it became a liturgical language like Latin or Vedic Sanskrit and so remained unchanged. But that's not language geek fun.
Also his example of Beowulf is, as someone who has published many papers and also taught linguistics, just stupid. That didn't happen to Hebrew or Greek or many other languages. English went through a massive lexicon, grammar, and pronounciation shift right after it. That was an abrupt non linear change in the language. In any case, with just a little practice you can read it far better than you might think.
It's also just false that words can't be observed long periods. Reconstructions of proto-indo-european show that very likely quite a few words hardly changd.
It's really sad that so many projects are picking only him, just like countless movies pick only a few musicians for their scores. The community is large and there are a lot of curious viewpoints and ideas out there.
And, you know, the whole "galactic Islam" thing that's being glossed over.
Which is absolutely ridiculous given how much they've taken from MENA countries visually—the most shallow kind of appropriation when it comes to movies.
The most devastating effect of the movement, was that most planets were largely governed by AI or less commonly cyborgs (cymeks). Rejection/Destruction of these machines left populations in utter chaos, from their managed state. Starvation, brutalism, etc. Imagine if any large country just stopped following a political and legal structure, eliminating anyone and anything who happened to support it. This was the cost of freeing humanity (according to the doctrine).
Another consideration is how suppressed previous knowledge was during the time the AI ruled over humans and how much was really lost during the Butlerian Jihad.
I'm not sure the Dune universe is fully elaborated from our days, but I would assume that every early human colony established by sleeper ships or embryo carriers would have a curated subset of human culture selected for maximising colony success. With that kind of redundancy, it'd be difficult to completely eradicate such information.
Is this true? I don’t think it is. Go watch or listen to some audiovisual records from not even a century ago, like a classic Hollywood film or one of the old WWII training films on YouTube for instance. If you listen for it, you will hear a dialectical drift.
Compare to Chinese, where dialects that separated a few hundred years ago are not mutually intelligible. I mean like, different Hakka dialects that arose two hundred years ago are not understandable to each other.
1800s English is Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, etc. Imagine the language changed so much you can't understand any of it
I'm not a linguist, but over any other four generations you'd surely expect to see a lot of this stuff change.
Is this by any chance the 'clock' of phonetic change in a language, and its use in predicting what an ancient language may have sounded like? I.e. Proto Indo-European? I'm a total linguistics amateur but fascinated by the field and bits of knowledge I pick up.
We can observe in English that this sort of effect has happened with the advent of the printed word - I've certainly read before that Shakespeare effectively codified the English language, not just by giving us lots of words and sayings, but by causing a de-facto standardisation by becoming widespread.
And while the language has moved on since then, and added a multitude of new words and phrase, the structure appears to have moved more slowly than it did before this time.
> It robs something from the original text
Eh, it's a while since I've read the original text, but Villeneuve's adaptation of part 1 left me cold anyway. It's a shame, this might be the last big-budget attempt at making a Dune movie, but to me it was hollow and dead. So if they've changed the language the Fremen speak, it's one of the lesser flaws.
https://i.imgur.com/ONFHF12.jpeg
I do not think the original Dune books did not portray the jihad in a good way. It was the way that led Paul to triumph over the Imperator, but it was also the path, that lead him to burn worlds and establish a cruel theocracy. Which was only hinted at in the first books, but showed completely in Dune Messiah. Which is why many did not like it anymore as the glorious hero was dismantled.
"Basically, you can't have nice things because that's what it means to be human."
But I would disagree to this conclusion. I rather think his goal was (among many others) to show that you cannot have nice things, when your "heros" of the culture stand for glorious war. No matter if it was a "good war" at first.
How could one choose between a jihad (bad on short term) and the golden path (good on very long term)? Especially if the golden path requires nasty personal sacrifices?
Paul did not like the choices he had (understandable) but can't say he was clearly a hero or an anti-hero.
Deleted Comment
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole
Translator here:
https://lingojam.com/BelterTranslator
There's obvious practical reasons for all of this, but I wouldn't call it a "gold standard".
(I have heard that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda made a big mistake in not creating any swear words for Modern Hebrew, leading to a substantial overlap in comprehensible swearing between jewish and arabic communities in J'lem. That said, I understand "chinga tu madre ... cabrón" perfectly well, so probably any language communities in close contact will swear at each other perfectly comprehensibly whether they share a vocabulary or not)
The article is basically about Dune & Peterson, and the work he's done, especially for Dune. It's not too surprising they left off other popular conlangs.
One thing I absolutely loved about the first Dune movie was the incorporation of secret hand signals (covert sign language) from the book. The use of secret hand signal conveys the gravity and peril of the world they live in.
Reading the book, I was surprised by the focus on mysticism and Islamic references, which were only a minor background element in the first movie. I do think the religious elements add depth to the story beyond the typical SciFi space opera and is a likely a strong contributing factor to Dune's enduring cultural impact. It's unfortunate the movies shied away from those references despite the potential consternation it may have stirred up.
For those that have recently read the book, this article by Harris Durrani on the probable influence of muslim theological development on Frank Herbert's Dune world is engrossing.
https://reactormag.com/the-muslimness-of-dune-a-close-readin...
Huh? Space opera was well established long before Dune[0]:
"Despite this seemingly early beginning, it was not until the late 1920s that the space opera proper began to appear regularly in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories.[7]: 10–18 [16] In film, the genre probably began with the 1918 Danish film, Himmelskibet.[20] Unlike earlier stories of space adventure, which either related the invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials, or concentrated on the invention of a space vehicle by a genius inventor, pure space opera simply took space travel for granted (usually by setting the story in the far future), skipped the preliminaries, and launched straight into tales of derring-do among the stars. Early stories of this type include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (Weird Tales, January 1925),[18] The Second Swarm (Amazing Stories Quarterly, spring 1928) and The Star Stealers (Weird Tales, February 1929), Ray Cummings' Tarrano the Conqueror (1925), and Edmond Hamilton's Across Space (1926) and Crashing Suns (Weird Tales, August–September 1928).[16] Similar stories by other writers followed through 1929 and 1930. By 1931, the space opera was well established as a major subgenre of science fiction.[citation needed]"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera#History
Dead Comment
Tangentially, I also think the time gap between the third and fourth books (some 3,500 years) necessitated some more creativity with changes to the culture but I got the impression that the author still reused a lot of the same references despite the gap which felt kind of lazy, like humanity was just TOO stagnant for that long. That's when I started thinking that it must be a difficult endeavor to just invent a lot of new culture, especially when you've got to do service to the previous books in the series. The fifth book appears to follow the same trend despite another 1,500 years of time.
So in this case “language stood still” doesn’t seem particularly out of place.
Author copied pieces of various real world ones & they all interact and somehow it all makes sense.
If anyone came at me with a pitch involving Jesuits, Islamic jihadists and a revolution against AI I'd say that's going to get you incoherent gibberish...but somehow it works.
The actual book about the Butlerian Jihad on the other hand…