Hello and happy Sunday!
This week marks the premiere of the new Shogun series on Disney+. We fondly remember the book and the story because we read and discussed it as a group not too long ago, and we were keen to get some adaptation done soon, seeing as the last one dated back to 1980.
As the book club moderator, I have had a few books in the book club history that I haven’t finished. Sometimes they catch me at the wrong time and I can’t get into them. Shogun is among them, although I did read a good chunk of it.
I have been eager about this release since I think the cast choice and perspective on the story might be a bit different than what the book offered in 1975; the setting is generous and allows for a bit of space and creativity.
The New Yorker published their first review even before the first episode was out and the praise is scarce.
The show’s world-building is elaborate and sometimes hard to keep up with, but it may also feel familiar. Studios and streamers have been trying to create the next “Game of Thrones” for at least a decade, investing heavily in fantasy tales, medieval realms, and pricey I.P. HBO attempted to build on its initial success with a Targaryen spinoff, “House of the Dragon”; Amazon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a “Lord of the Rings” prequel series it hoped would inspire similar devotion. In the case of “Shōgun,” a “Game of Thrones”-style premise is accompanied by “Game of Thrones”-style carnage: in the first episode alone, there’s a surprise beheading, death by boiling, ritual infanticide, and off-screen seppuku. (Many other harakiris will take place in plain view before the season is over.) Blackthorne, whose time at sea has made him no stranger to violence, finds the routine slaughter appalling. Toranaga, too, is reluctant to enforce honor codes that end not just single lives but entire family lines—and wary of the possibility of a new shogunate, deeming such a military dictatorship “a brutal relic from a bygone era.” This restraint is undercut by one of his generals, the cocky Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano), who, despite his sadism as an executioner, comes across as the series’ most believable character for his blithe self-interest and transparent scheming. The general’s slippery desperation as he attempts to play both sides, heightened by Asano’s petty-uncle energy, yields one of the season’s most engaging story lines. (…)
Like “Game of Thrones,” “Shōgun” is a demanding watch, with dozens of characters sharing long, interlocking histories; a sprawling in-universe map; and frustratingly dim cinematography. By my count, about three-quarters of the dialogue is in Japanese, and it’s something of a wonder that the show exists at all, with a cast unknown to most Americans and a setting so far removed from us by time, geography, and culture.
The New Yorker
Dune, Part Two is out - the delicate balance of inventing its language
There are so many things about the franchise that we could explore. One that is of particular interest to me is the foreign language they invented for the movie.
The New Yorker again writes:
Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement.
The article on the fictitious languages of some of the best-known films and shows in recent history explores the phenomenon and provides a bit of background on the inventors of the languages.
The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson (…) Peterson’s big break came in 2009, when HBO reached out to the Language Creation Society with a strange request. They were creating a television show (which would turn out to be “Game of Thrones”) and wanted someone to develop a language (which would emerge as Dothraki) (…) He made it to the second round and eventually produced more than three hundred pages in Dothraki. He landed the job and was later invited to develop five more languages for the series, including High Valyrian, which proved especially popular among fans. In 2017, a High Valyrian course launched on the language-learning app Duolingo; at one point in 2023, more than nine hundred thousand people had signed up as active users.
The article goes into some detail about the linguistic aspects of the existing foreign languages of the world and the logic behind choosing a certain sound or other for the fictitious ones.
When creating High Valyrian, Peterson was forced to include words that George R. R. Martin had composed for the books, including dracarys, meaning “dragon fire.” The word was obviously inspired by the Latin draco, meaning “dragon,” a decision that Peterson found “unfortunate.” “In the universe of the books, there is no such thing as the Latin language—or any of the other languages on Earth,” he once wrote. “It is literally impossible for any word (or anything else) in the Song of Ice and Fire universe to be related to anything in our universe.” As a result, he made dracarys its own root and chose zaldrīzes as the word for “dragon,” provoking a string of disappointed comments from “Game of Thrones” fans on his blog.
Of course, he wrote a book explaining all his techniques:
As Peterson laid out in his 2015 book, “The Art of Language Invention,” he treats languages as evolving systems whose features are interconnected and shaped by a unique history. To design verbs in High Valyrian, for example, he simulated a four-stage evolution from a prehistoric form. In the version of High Valyrian spoken in “Game of Thrones,” verbs have an imperfect stem (for past actions that were continuous or incomplete) and a perfect stem (for past actions that were completed). The perfect stem, he decided, was formed in ancient times by appending -tat to the end of the imperfect. Over time, this became -tet and then -et, which often reduces to -t in the version spoken in the television show. (During that imagined history, -tat also gave rise to the verb tatagon, meaning “to finish.”) There are countless other intricacies to High Valyrian verbs, yet, for Peterson, even producing this lone grammatical feature required simulating generations of linguistic change.
Peterson was the person they hired to handle the imaginary language in Dune:
The novel features words derived from French (“verite”), Turkish (“kanly”), Hebrew (“Kwisatz Haderach”), German (“schlag”), and Navajo (“Nezhoni”). Having been raised in a Sikh household, I remember noticing the emperor’s title, Padishah, a Persian term that has been used as an honorific for rulers in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Sikhs use it to refer to God and the ten prophet leaders, or gurus.
The language with the greatest influence in “Dune” is Arabic. In the novel, the Fremen use at least eighty terms with clear Arabic origins, many of them tied to Islam. The Fremen follow istislah (“natural law”) and ilm (“theology”). They respect karama (“miracle”) and ijaz (“prophecy”), and are attentive to ayat (“signs”) and burhan (“proof”) of life. They quote the Kitab al-Ibar, or “Book of Lessons,” an allusion to the encyclopedia of world history penned by the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (…)
Herbert also said, in a 1976 interview, that he resented the tendency “not to study Islam, not to recognize how much it has contributed to our culture.” By making it a “strong element” in the book, Herbert may have been trying to convey the “enormous debts of gratitude” that he felt humanity owed Islam.
Although Peterson’s version of the Fremen language retains a vaguely Arabic sound, almost all other traces of the language have been expunged from Villeneuve’s “Dune” films. Peterson claims that this is in the name of believability. “The time depth of the Dune books makes the amount of recognizable Arabic that survived completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) impossible,” he wrote on Reddit. When a user asked him to explain, he pointed to “Beowulf,” which was written around a thousand years ago and is uninterpretable to most modern English speakers. “And we’re talking about twenty thousand years?! Not a single shred of the language should be recognizable.” Key terms like shai-hulud and Lisan al-Gaib have made it into the films, but they’re treated in Peterson’s conlang as fortuitous convergences, not ancient holdovers, as if English were to one day lose the word “sandwich” only to serendipitously re-create it thousands of years later from new etymological building blocks.