This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, swing into the language verse.

Coming up in today's show we find out what it takes to make a fictional language sound

realistic, even when the speaker is riding on a dragon.

On with the show.

Well, I became very interested in learning languages, just as many as I could.

But as my last year of high school I became really interested in language.

And so when I got to Berkeley for college, I wanted to study as many languages as I could.

And so I started taking Arabic, I took Russian, and one of the languages that was offered,

was advertised actually on the door of my dorm, was Esperanto.

It was a student taught course.

And I'd never heard of anybody creating a language before, so this was very interesting

to me.

I thought to myself, what if I created a language of my own?

So, he did.

You know, I found it immensely rewarding and just extremely addictive.

And so I just kept up with it for the next 18 years, 18, 19 years, I guess.

My name is David Peterson, and I'm a language creator and writer.

I am best known for being the creator of the Dothraki and Valerian languages on HBO's

Game of Thrones.

Approximate how many languages have you invented at this point?

Oh, I think I've invented over 50 languages at this point.

Not all of them are very large in terms of vocabulary size, and not all of them are very

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