This college will officially be offering a class on “Game of Thrones”
Can’t wait for the new season? Maybe you should study up in the meantime. If you live in California, you might be able to do it for credit. UC Berkeley is offering a Game of Thrones summer class, and 40 students will be lucky enough to take it. Even better, the course is being taught by David J. Peterson. Who is David J. Peterson? He’s an American linguist who actually created the Dothraki and Valyrian languages. Talk about cool.
The course, titled “The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention,” will take place over six weeks.
Based on the subject, and the instructor, we can imagine that there’ll be a lot of discussions taking place in Dothraki. So, it’s kind of like getting graded on something you’ve already tried to master at home by yourself anyway.
(You can admit it. There’s nothing wrong with nerding out at home in-between seasons.)
But, just because this sounds like an incredibly fun class doesn’t mean it’ll be easy. In fact, Peterson already mentioned that it’d be a huge challenge. And it hasn’t even started yet!
"It’s not going to focus on the creation of alien languages, or auxiliary languages, or parody languages," he said.
Instead, it’ll focus on naturalistic language. A lot of hard work goes into making sure that these new languages are believable and pure, so Peterson definitely plans on going all-in and teaching his students how to master the skill successfully.
So, when can we enroll?