High Valyrian - Tumblr Posts

Everyone wants to talk about Aemonds 1000+ day Duolingo streak and Aegons 1 day streak, but no one wants to talk about Sunfyre and his 2000+ day streak

Sunfyre:

Valyrian Names for Writers!

Credit: Tommyscottart on Devianart.

So with the rise of HOTD I thought I might post something that other writers may find useful for their work, specifically when it comes to naming valyrian OCs!

Obviously we've been given a fair amount of canon valyrian names from ASOIAF and Fire & Blood but not everyone wants to reuse the same names. So I thought I'd share some sources I've found that were helpful!

One & Two

Both of these reddit posts to r/asoiaf by u/AliceCringekung and u/CW_73 have been a major help when it comes to naming valyrian characters by providing an assortment of all possible valyrian names based on the ones we've seen in canon.

(u/AliceCringekung's post even has some notes about the valyrian naming system.)

Both used the known prefixes and suffixes to come up with the names.

Prefixes:

Dae-, Ae-, Rhae-, Mae-, Bae-, Vis-, Vae-, Valae-, Jaehae-, Gae-, Elae-, Lae-, Jacae, Matae-, Hae-, Helae-, Nae-, Au-, Ayr-, Jae-, Va-, Vale-, Sae-, Shae-, Cor-, and Rho-.

Suffixes:

-erys, -ella/-ela, -ena, -enya, -mon/-mond, -gon, -gor, -gar, -ger, -lor, -lora, -kar, -enys, -ryn, -erea, -erion, -emion, -nar, -lon, -erra/-era, -eron, -gelle, -el, -elle, -gel, -lys, -lyx, -midon, -nara, -nora, -larr, -nor, and -nyra.

Those are the ones we know/have appeared in canon.

Looking at those, particularly the prefixes, we can make a few guesses on other prefixes that might also work for Valyrian names, for example:

Tae-, Kae-, Rae-, and Cae-.

AE is a popular point in valyrian names, so you can assume that any other letter followed by AE would work as a prefix.

Another thing I've noticed is that the names never seem to be more than three or four syllables which tend to 'flow' nicely into each other. Also, outside of the 'Jaehae' prefix, which can be seen as the 'Jae' and 'Hae' prefixes combined, none of the other prefixes seem to be used together in one name. It also seems to apply to suffixes as well.

So when making a valyrian name it's probably best to remember;

[prefix] + [suffix] = [name]

Hope you guys find this helpful!

((Credit to the OG creators of the 2 reddit posts!)

Daemon and Rhaenyra in 1×07 icons ˎˊ˗

Am I back to do icons?? Idk let's find out

like or reblog if you save/use any icon pls <3

Someone on Reddit asked about a name like "Star Eater" in Valyrian for a dragon and I wanted to share my response here, as well.

*****

If you want my 2¢ on this, names like Star Eater, Moon Racer, Sun Chaser, etc. are good examples of Common Tongue dragon names, but not good examples of Valyrian dragon names. In the Common Tongue (a.k.a. English) it's easy to put together compounds and come up with names. This is much, much less likely to happen in Valyrian. You can do it, but, frankly, it sounds clunky and awkward.

To give you a real world example of this, here are some Song of Ice and Fire names translated into Spanish:

Storm's End: Bastion de Tormentas

King's Landing: Desembarco del Rey

Rattleshirt: Casaca de Matraca

The translators are trying their best, but these translations simply do not (a) convey the sense you get from the English, or (b) come off as natural-sounding Spanish names. This is exactly what you get when you translate things like "Moondancer" or "Dark Sister" into Valyrian.

A more natural way to create a Valyrian name that sounds Valyrian is to start with your target word and embellish it. If you start with qēlos you might get Qēlazmia or Qēlalbrion, both of which might be kind of clunkily translated into English as "Great Star". In truth, there's no way to capture the sense of it with a single word in English because our morphology works differently. You'd have a better shot in Spanish (maybe Estrellona).

If you wanted to translate "Star Eater" literally, it'd be something like Qēlosipradaros. It is quite literally "star-eater", but it doesn't look like a Valyrian name. Think about all the Valyrian names you see in the book—for dragons and people: Daenerys, Aegon, Viserys, Meraxes, Aemon, Aenys, Rhaegar, Jaehaerys, Helaena, Rhaenyra, Daemon… They don't look that big. They don't look like compounds. They can essentially be broken down into three parts: (1) the main semantic content piece, (2) the augment (optional), and (3) the ending. Daemon, for example, looks about as basic as a Valyrian name gets. You have part (1) daem and part (3) -on. We see the ending -on a lot, so we know it's an ending, as opposed to -mon, for example. Daeneryslooks a little bigger, so you have part (1) daen, part (2) -er, and part (3) -ys. That is as big and complex as a Valyrian name gets.

If you look at the list of known dragons, the only time you see the English-y names for dragons are afterAegon's Conquest. And this makes sense. Once they're living in Westeros, the Targaryens start adopting Westerosi customs more and more: their language, their religion, their day-to-day practices... The younger Targaryens are essentially Common speakers that Valyrian as a heritage language. It makes sense that they'd name their dragons in the Common Tongue. There are a still a few Valyrian names mixed in, but that's also to be expected, depending on whether they want to honor their family's heritage or do something new that speaks to them.

In short, it doesn't make sense to render the Common Tongue names in Valyrian as they were never Valyrian to begin with. I'd say if you like the meaning "Stareater", do it in English. If you want a Valyrian name, build it up in a Valyrian way.

it's fascinating to me how endlessly complicated High Valyrian seems to be when you answer questions about it. Is there any language in the world more or less at the same level of complexity?

It depends how you're thinking of complexity. All the languages of the world are equally complex. They have to be, because they all need to perform the same function, and they're all used by the same human brains living inside the same humans living human lives. I think English speakers (and hypothesize that, by extension, the same would be true of Chinese speakers, Hawaiian speakers, Vietnamese speakers, Swedish speakers) look at certain other languages and think of them as more complex in the meta sense because they are more morphologically complex.

By this, I mean in English, for a noun you need to know its singular and plural form—that's it. For a verb, you need to know its -s form, its -ed form, its -ing form, and, very rarely, its -en form. There is some irregularity in form for almost all of these (-ing appears to always be regular), but there aren't more forms, outside of "to be", which has a unique first person singular form.

And...that's it, really. We have adjectival comparison, I guess, but even that can be traded out for an expression (aside from "better" which can't be replaced easily by "more good", most comparatives can be replaced—e.g. you can say something is "more red" than something else even though you can also say it's "redder" than something else). There aren't many word form changes in English a user has to learn in order to be able to use those words in a sentence. The same is true of those languages I listed in the parenthetical phrase above.

Compare that to Spanish, where there are more word form changes for verbs in the present tense (indicative and subjunctive) than in the entirety of English. And that's just one tense for verbs! There's loads more that needs to be memorized; many more word form changes you need to know to be able to use words effectively in a sentence. And there are irregularities on top of that!

Is it the case, therefore, that Spanish is more complex than English?

Certainly, Spanish is more morphologically complex, but does that mean you can express more in Spanish than you can in English? Certainly not! So then what does it mean when we say Spanish is more morphologically complex than English? What's the upshot? What does it mean for the language user?

Perhaps it would help if we compare some Spanish verbs and their English translations:

hablabas "you were talking"

hablé "I spoke"

hable "you would speak"

The precise translation of these verbs will depend on context, but this is a fine example. These are all single words of Spanish. They're different forms that must be memorized, but they're single words. The English requires at least two words for each concept.

So which is more complex? On the one hand, you have fewer words but more forms. On the other, more words, and more words = bigger.

And that, essentially, is the crux of it.

Any time you have complexity baked into single words morphologically in one language, you'll find complexity in the form of multiword expressions in a less morphologically complex language. The meanings are always there(*), but they're expressed in different ways.

As English speakers, we're used to having to express things in multiword expressions, and a speaker of a given language will find their own language to be simple just because. We extend that to think of languages like ours as simpler than those that are different. But, in truth, it's six of one, half dozen of another. Furthermore, there's just as much complexity in languages with less morphological complexity. Consider the following expressions in American English:

I walked to the store. ✅

I walked to a store. ✅

I walked to store. ❌

That's pretty standard. English has articles and you need to use them, right?

I ate the dinner. ✅

I ate a dinner. ✅

I ate dinner. ✅

All those are okay. They don't mean the same thing—and, indeed, the first two have much more restricted contexts—but they're all okay. That's a little weird, isn't it?

Not as weird as this:

I made it by the hand. ❌

I made it by a hand. ❌

I made it by hand. ✅

The first two aren't just weird: they're yikes-a-doodle-do wrong. You might try to brush it aside and say that it's just an expression, and, sure, it is, but ask yourself this: how'd that expression come about in the first place? This one is actually from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) and still works the same way in American English:

You kiss by the book. ✅

You kiss by a book. ❌

You kiss by book. ❌

And just for funsies:

He won by the nose. ❌

He won by a nose. ✅

He won by nose. ❌

You might think the way these shake has to do with what they stand for—that the semantics of the noun in question condition whether or not you can use articles—but consider the first one "store" and compare it to this one:

I walked to the Barnes & Noble. ✅

I walked to a Barnes & Noble. ✅

I walked to Barnes & Noble. ✅

Barnes & Noble is a store, but refer to it by title, and suddenly it's all okay.

Now, if your native language is English, ask yourself: when and how did you learn all of this? Did someone sit you down and tell you where to use which articles and where not to? I'm sure there was some level of instruction you got in elementary school (whether it was accurate or not), but how much of a difference do you think that made? Did you just not use articles before then? And even now, could you explain this? Do you even think about it? Or do you just do it—flawlelssly and effortlessly? Adult learners of English will tell you learning this stuff is a nightmare. Throw in phrasal verbs (pick up vs. pick out vs. pick on vs. pick up on vs. plain old pick) and suddenly English doesn't look too simple anymore.

Bringing this back to your question, when you look at High Valyrian, is there a natural language with an equal amount of morphological complexity? Sure. Maybe something like Latin. But understand that any language will be as complex—not more, not less: as. The only difference with High Valyrian, actually, is its vocabulary isn't as large (give me a couple decades), and it doesn't have nearly as many users as any natural languages. It's also being kept artificially small, in that the language is built up to fit a fictional reality, rather than being expanded to handle anything, the way modern languages are. But pick up any language and it will be equally complex.

(*) From above, it is not always the case that the same "meanings" will be in the equivalent translation of a given sentence. A good example is gender. If you say El río es largo in Spanish it means "The river is long" in English. Like, exactly that. There is no question that these two phrases are functionally equivalent. HOWEVER there is more information in the Spanish sentence. The words el, río and largo are all masculine gender. What does that mean? Nothing more than that they're not feminine. If you hear el in Spanish there are a limited number of words that can legally follow it. When you hear largo, you know that what it refers to has to be in the same class. The function of this is simply to enrich the signal. If you only hear "is large" in English from the previous sentence, you have no idea what noun is large. If you hear es largo in Spanish, you also don't know—but whatever that thing is, you know it has to be masculine. That means that if a Spanish speaker has to guess what es largo they were trivially have a better shot at guessing correctly than an English speaker guessing what "is large" (e.g. if an English speaker has a one in a million shot, a Spanish speaker has a one in 500,000 shot, because roughly half the nouns of Spanish are masculine and half feminine). This means, technically, there's more information in the Spanish sentence than the English sentence, and that information is not represented at all in the English sentence, and is, essentially, unrecoverable. But that "information" is more morphological in nature than semantic.

If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?

Dedication or Sad?

I am learning a new language (high valyrian) which was solely created for the ASOIAF universe, so that I can write accurate sentences in my fanfics because online translators are not very good.

Is that me being sad or dedication to the cause?

Instead of aegon learning high valyrian to communicate with sunfyre, sunfyre learned english

Just found out that Duolingo offers lessons in Klingon and High Valyrian I’ll be using this app every day now thank you🫶 They better add Elvish next or some shit.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐉𝐄𝐖𝐄𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐒

𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑛 𝑜𝑏𝑠𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑟𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑦𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑔𝑖𝑟𝑙 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝐵𝑟𝑎𝑎𝑣𝑜𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑒𝑛 𝑓𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑦 𝑎𝑠 𝑝𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑦𝑚𝑏𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝑏𝑒ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑠. 𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑢𝑝𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑢𝑐𝑐𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛（𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑛 𝑠𝑜𝑖𝑙 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑔𝑛 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑒𝑟）𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑠ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑔𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑔𝑎𝑚𝑒？𝑂𝑟 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑠ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟？

𝑊𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑝𝑖𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑒 𝐴𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒 (2006）𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑄𝑢𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑡𝑒 (2023）

Stay tuned…..

xoxo,

xxCocoiixx