# Dothraki, Vulcan etc. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 18, 2017, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939 "2017-11-18T00:49:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/21 "2017-11-18T13:33:31Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > [Book recommendation time](http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/). I endorse the recommendation of “In the Land of Invented Languages” - great book! ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/22 "2017-11-18T14:01:11Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > [The language](http://despicableme.wikia.com/wiki/Minionese)spoken by the minions in \*Despicable Me \*is a constructed language with actual syntax and vocabulary. As is the Dothraki language of GOT, which has some 3600 words at this point. The language, along with Valyrian, were created by linguist David Peterson for the series. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/23 "2017-11-18T14:20:37Z")
> [@legion60](#): > > Qzwxecrtv. > Btw, Qzwxecrtv means thanks in Bollocks. > We are now both fluent in Bollocks. Thanks to **legion** , I’ve now discovered how much I enjoy wrapping my tongue around Bollocks. Off to add a line to my CV: _“Linguistics: conversational French, basic proficiency in Japanese, and completely immersed/utterly fluent in Bollocks, in both business and pub environments”_ _Qzwxecrtv!_ ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/24 "2017-11-18T15:32:45Z")
> [@digs](#): > > Thanks to **legion** , I’ve now discovered how much I enjoy wrapping my tongue around Bollocks. > Off to add a line to my CV: > > _“Linguistics: conversational French, basic proficiency in Japanese, and completely immersed/utterly fluent in Bollocks, in both business and pub environments”_ > > _Qzwxecrtv!_ Coincidentally, Qzwxecr TV is Mister Mxyzptlk’s favorite station. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/25 "2017-11-18T15:44:45Z")
> [@Chefguy](#): > > Coincidentally, Qzwxecr TV is Mister Mxyzptlk’s favorite station. Shhh! We set up that station so we could sneak the Bollocks word _Kltpzyxm_ into the closed captioning. Mr. M hates it when a subtitle’s wrong, and when he yells “Hey, they didn’t say Kltpzyxm!”… poof. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/26 "2017-11-18T15:50:48Z")
> [@psychonaut](#): > > Yes it does. Streaming is the same as downloading. In the case of YouTube or Vimeo or Dailymotion, your browser saves the file somewhere unobtrusive and automatically deletes it after some time. It’s called caching. No, it in fact doesn’t. It does download the data. It does cache the download, which can wind up on disk (but not always). But modern streaming is generally designed to avoid saving the entire file. Y’all understand the difference. The video did not stream automatically, but downloaded as a file that needs a special player in order to be viewed. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/27 "2017-11-18T15:58:47Z")
As for the question asked in the OP: If it can have entire works translated into it, I say it’s a language. It may not be a living language if it’s no longer being updated. But we don’t generally say that a dead language has ceased to be a language. I think there is a useful distinction between those fictional languages that are functional and those that are not. I would contrast Vulcan or Ferengi and Klingon. The first two are too small, but Klingon is entirely functional, and thus “counts” as a real language as far as I’m concerned. I am not familiar enough with the other languages to guess, though vocabulary is probably a good first approximation. xkcd’s simple English experiment suggests you need about 1000 words. Of course, if those words don’t cover enough breadth (being all nouns, for example), that wouldn’t work. But I think it’s a good starting point. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/28 "2017-11-18T17:46:20Z")
I really don’t want to sidetrack this discussion with quibbling over what “downloading” is. Whether playing a streaming audio file is downloading or not depends on your definition of “download”, and I could make a reasonable argument either way. It’s not really important. What’s important is **Little Nemo** ’s implied concern that something dangerous could be happening because a new file was created on their system. On the contrary, downloading a file is safer than streaming it. If your browser just downloads a file, it reads bytes and stores them in a file in your Downloads folder, where it sits, inert, incapable of causing any harm. On the other hand, streaming the file feeds it into a program and if that program has security bugs, the streamed file could accidentally or deliberately trigger such bugs to cause harm to your system. Of course if you ever actually play a downloaded file, the same security issues arise. But the danger is in playing the file, not in downloading it. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/29 "2017-11-18T20:15:57Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > In the cases of both Marc Okrand’s Klingon and Tolkien’s two most complete Elvish languages (Quenya and Sindarin), the fan base generally considers it unacceptable to invent changes to the languages that don’t appear in canonical works by the languages’ authors. This, I would argue, means that none of these are “real languages”, since it is the fundamental nature of languages that they change with use. A very interesting viewpoint on the state of Tolkien’s languages today is expounded in Carl Hostetter’s essay “Elvish as She is Spoke”, which argues that the current widely used form of Sindarin today, in such works as David Salo’s “A Gateway to Sindarin” and in the Peter Jackson movies, has been regularized and extended to the extent that it is no longer the language that Tolkien intended. Since Tolkien’s goal was never to create a complete and usable language, this is pretty much unavoidable when anyone tries to use it as such. Excellent post. I would add that actual human language systems seem to automatically “fill out” in just a generation or two, if they start out in a limited way. Hence a pidgin (limited vocabulary to allow two groups who speak different languages to communicate in a limited way) will become a Creole (fully developed language that shares elements of the languages it was derived from) if children grow up exposed to it, and use it as a primary means of communication. We seem to have a capacity for language that manifests itself more or less naturally, and that cannot be squelched except in cases where the child is abused to the point of not being exposed to language, or only being exposed in a very limited way, as the child is growing up. An invented language that is “boxed in”, as **Mark** describes above, is probably best NOT thought of as a fully developed human language. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/30 "2017-11-18T20:21:40Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > In the cases of both Marc Okrand’s Klingon and Tolkien’s two most complete Elvish languages (Quenya and Sindarin), the fan base generally considers it unacceptable to invent changes to the languages that don’t appear in canonical works by the languages’ authors. This, I would argue, means that none of these are “real languages”, since it is the fundamental nature of languages that they change with use. A very interesting viewpoint on the state of Tolkien’s languages today is expounded in Carl Hostetter’s essay “Elvish as She is Spoke”, which argues that the current widely used form of Sindarin today, in such works as David Salo’s “A Gateway to Sindarin” and in the Peter Jackson movies, has been regularized and extended to the extent that it is no longer the language that Tolkien intended. Since Tolkien’s goal was never to create a complete and usable language, this is pretty much unavoidable when anyone tries to use it as such. “Elvish as She is Spoke” [www.elvish.org/articles/EASIS.pdf](http://www.elvish.org/articles/EASIS.pdf) is well worth reading. ---
**Author:** ![Evan\_Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/b487fb/32.png) [@Evan\_Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evan_Drake)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939/31 "2017-11-18T21:05:38Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > No, it in fact doesn’t. It does download the data. It does cache the download, which can wind up on disk (but not always). But modern streaming is generally designed to avoid saving the entire file. > > Y’all understand the difference. The video did not stream automatically, but downloaded as a file that needs a special player in order to be viewed. Perhaps, but in my wild youth, before they introduced proper ways to download, I was quite capable of playing something, going to the browser’s cache, identifying a file by size, copying it, renaming it and _voila_, I had an mp4 recording. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dothraki-vulcan-etc/801939.md?page=1)