Another great leap in how cool geeks are…

A recent article in Scientific Monthly discusses a scientist’s open letter to the producer’s of HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones epic.  If you haven’t yet read George R.R. Martin’s saga, you’re really missing out on probably the greatest fantasy story since Lord of the Rings.  The producers of the show, whose attention to the painstaking detail of realism is admirable, are even recruiting linguists to create a completely unique language:  Dothraki (the language of the nomadic horse warriors in the series).  This seems to be a popular trend lately, as Cameron did the same thing for his numbskull Avatar natives.  Joshua Hartshorne, a graduate student of Psychology at Harvard knew that the scientific potential for the development of this language could prove fruitful.  He proposed several language development challenges in order to determine whether future learners of the language would be able to grasp and remember them.  Why is he so jazzed about this opportunity?  One word:  nerds.

True nerds are always more than willing to learn the languages of their favorite fictional worlds.  In the case of Dothraki, however, scientists could take an active hand in the development of a language that would test several theories about how easy it is to learn certain aspects of language (e.g.-an even more arbitrary gender designation for nouns than the Spanish system).  These challenges would help scientists determine just how savvy the brain can be in developing language.

I’ve often wondered why people would put so much of their lives into the learning of a fictional language, or the elaborate construction of costumes, or the cataloging of the historical or technical background of governments and machines, and I’m as big of a nerd as they come.  However, fictions like Star Trek have inspired countless useful scientific innovations for years.   With Dothraki, if Hartshorne has his way, language geeks will pave a new way for nerds to shine and make the world that much easier to understand.