Re: Conlanging in the news

Hey.

On 4/20/05, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> Joseph wrote:
> <<
> I've sometimes wondered how to get on that elite list of people who
> are considered by capable of creating a language for this or that
> alien race for film or TV. I, too, could use the money.
>  >>
>
> It appears that one way to get on the elite list is to never have
> created a language before, or even attempted it.  So, that counts
> a lot of us out.  Sorry.  :(  Seriously, though: Wikeley, Okrand,
> the guys who created the Myst language, the ones who created
> the gibberish for the various Blizzard games--none of them
> conlangers.
I think it has more to do with who is at hand; if your production
company is in SoCal, you have a couple of universities with big
linguistics depts you can tap for cheap labor. Matt Pearson, a UCLA
grad student, was contacted by a TV production company for a conlang
(which he made for them; too bad the series was such a dog). I don't
know how much he got paid, but when the people from Blade II got in
touch for the vampire language, he quoted them a figure which they
apparently felt was outrageous.

The 70s series "Land of the Lost" featured a conlang written by Vicky
Fromkin, late professor of linguistics at UCLA. She also did the
language for the first Blade movie before she passed away. I don't
know what Okrand's story is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he were
simply "at hand" when Star Trek II started up.

So the lesson is to live next to movie producers and script writers and shmooze.

Dirk
--
Watch the reply-to!