There are seven different words in Dothraki for striking another person with a sword. Among them: “hlizifikh,” a wild but powerful strike; “hrakkarikh,”a quick and accurate strike; and “gezrikh,” a fake-out or decoy strike. But you won’t find these words in George R. R. Martin’s epic series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is where Dothraki originated as the language of the eponymous horse-riding warriors; rather these and more than 3,000 other words were developed by David Peterson, the world’s authority on Dothraki.

At TED2013, Peterson gave this fascinating TED University talk on the process of creating Dothraki for the TV series Game of Thrones. Based on Martin’s books, the HBO series premieres its third season on Sunday.

Peterson, who has a masters in linguistics from UC San Diego, was teaching English composition at Fullerton College when he heard that HBO was hiring someone to develop Dothraki for Game of Thrones. For the next four years Peterson developed the Dothraki grammar and wrote a dictionary of around 3,400 words.

Peterson is also the alien language and culture consultant at SyFy’s Defiance and the president of the Language Creation Society (LCS), which is made up of conlangers – creators of conlangs, or constructed languages.

Language enthusiasts have been creating languages from scratch since at least the twelfth century: for fun, for secret communication with loved ones, in pursuit of the perfect language. Conlangs have surged in popularity in recent years thanks to films and TV series like Avatar (whose characters speak Na’Vi), Lord of the Rings (Elvish) and Game of Thrones; the grandaddy of pop-culture conlangs is Star Trek‘s Klingon, a widely studied language almost as popular as Esperanto. (Both Klingon and Esperanto are available as subtitles on TED.com).

In the conlang community, Peterson is a hero. The same goes for John Quijada, the creator of Ithkuil, who was recently profiled by Joshua Foer in the New Yorker. Ithkuil seeks to encode as much information as possible in as small a space as possible, with as little ambiguity as possible. Is Ithkuil the perfect conlang? Perhaps. But Peterson says that he has never put much stock in the idea of perfection.

“Language,” he says, “is a system. We humans aren’t. We’re quite imperfect. When it comes to using even a perfect system, we will break it in some way.”

As Peterson says in his talk, a big part of the process of naturalizing conlangs is attempting to imitate the quirks and idiosyncrasies of a natural language as it evolves over time. In developing Dothraki, Peterson started by imagining how the Dothraki people would have spoken 1,000 years in the past. Creating a protolanguage allowed Peterson to evolve Dothraki “organically,” changing its sounds, grammar and semantics. But how do you create linguistic regression?

The first challenge in imagining a lost culture is to unlearn what you know about modern technology in order to grasp a linguistic view of the world before, say, books and medicine. Says Peterson, “You become part historian, part archaeologist, part detective. You say, ‘Here were my resources, how did I know all this stuff?’”

In the case of the Dothraki, there’s the added fact that the speakers exist in a fictional world, so their history is technically unknown, yet still must be realistic to the legions of fans scrutinizing the books and show.

(Why not just call up George R.R. Martin and ask? Not an option. According to Peterson, Martin is pleased with the existence of Dothraki but not especially invested in it, given how busy he is. In fact, he’s the one who occasionally calls up Peterson for a translation. Peterson happily gives it to him.)

But some aspects of Dothraki history are available to Peterson. Martin very clearly based the Dothraki on the Mongolians of the Silk Road era, with aspects of some Native American cultures mixed in. So Peterson draws on these sources for naming flora and fauna. Recently Peterson found out that in Mongolian there are two different words for animal poop, depending on whether it’s fresh or dry. (Dry animal poop is used for fires in winter, since it burns longer.) Now, he says, the Dothraki language makes this distinction, too.

Where existing context is not available, a conlanger can bring his or her own experiences to the language, as in the case of the Dothraki word for “to dream.” Peterson wanted to capture the essence of dreaming, which for him means feeling, while sleeping, that there’s no other life or world. Peterson started with the word for wood and changed it to its adjective form, wooden, or “ido.” Since in Dothraki wood is used to describe fake swords, “wooden” comes to be synonymous with “fake.” A dream then becomes a wooden life, a fake life. In Dothraki, to dream, or “thirat atthiraride,” literally means “to live a wooden life.”

While many conlangs are created for fictional characters, the majority are not. But a language is nothing without its speaker — so how do conlangers deal with the fact that their speakers have no history or culture? Is it possible to create a naturalized conlang without also creating an entire world around it? Indeed, it’s a challenge that Peterson discovered late. Initially he wasn’t interested in creating cultures, but realized that if you don’t have a very specific idea of who is speaking the language, your language automatically carries a whole host of cultural assumptions — probably yours.

An example Peterson often gives is creating a native word for “book.” It seems like a simple task, but this actually assumes quite a lot about the speakers: that they have a written form of their language; that they have something to write down; that they have some value for literature or scholarship; that literature or scholarship exists; that they’ve invented paper; that they’ve invented styluses, ink and book binding. One word, a world of assumptions.

As president of the LCS, Peterson communicates with and celebrates conlangers all over the world, handing out the annual Smiley Award to the year’s best created language. So what makes a good conlanger? “It’s a combination of somebody who is very technically minded, who is very good with puzzles or coding,” says Peterson. “And somebody who has a literary bone inside them, who is a big reader and loves stories.”

This marriage of the technical and aesthetic explains why Peterson’s favorite conlang is Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen, which defies a universal element of language: It has no verbs. It’s common for created languages to have alien or unnatural constraints, says Peterson, but Sotomayor beautifully naturalized hers, bringing artistry to an engineered system.

Photo: HBO

Photo courtesy of: ABC

Has a TED Talk ever happened live from a hospital? Well, not in real life — but yes on television. Last night on Grey’s Anatomy, TED became a part of the surgical action when Dr. Callie Torres was prepping to give a talk on the wonders of cartilage. But when a leaking tanker led to extensive injuries and burns, she’s was unable to leave the Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital ER to get to the conference. In the emotional peak of the episode, she delivers her talk via livestream from the hospital conference room.

Watch the full episode on ABC.com. And fast forward to 35:50 to see Callie Torre’s TED Talk. It begins, “I had a pretty bad year…”

On May 7 at 10pm, PBS will air the very first televised TED event, TED Talks Education. The event, filmed in New York on April 4, brings together an hour of speakers and performers with a deep-rooted passion for education, and a focus on one of the major crises affecting US education right now: kids who don’t finish high school. Students drop out for thousands of reasons. How can we think about the problem?

The first three speakers booked: Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, plus TED favorites Bill Gates and Sir Ken Robinson — and watch for more announcements in coming weeks of dynamic teachers, speakers and performers to take the stage. The show is set to appear on PBS’ website after the air date, and we’ll let you know more soon.

TED Talks Education will be broadcast nationally in the U.S. and will be produced by WNET in conjunction with TED.  The program is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Graduate Program. It promises to be an exciting, thought-provoking hour of television.

Want a preview? After the jump, watch Bill Gates’ fiery, data-packed talk on the US state budgeting system — which, he says, uses accounting tricks to siphon money away from schools and give it to entrenched interests.

What’s next for Joshua Klein, the man who built a vending machine for crows? The versatile hacker is the new host of the National Geographic show The Link, in which he travels the world to research and reveal the origins of some of history’s most important technological innovations, like Greek fire and the Chinese long sword. The show premiered two weeks ago and is on the National Geographic Channel Friday nights at 7pm EST/PST. The TED Blog caught up with Klein to talk about his new venture.

The Link looks like a lot of fun to shoot. Which episode was your favorite?

Each episode was different, and we didn’t shoot everything in order so it’d be hard to pick a single one. The fact that the show jumps around all over the world and through so many countries made it a little like the world’s best research vacation — especially when we got to visit the birthplace of so many major innovations!

There were highlights, like getting a backdoor tour of the Terra Cotta Warriors in China, or playing with an original Enigma machine or Gutenberg Bible, but the main thing for me was connecting the dots — with my own hands — between all those historic innovations. I’ve spent a lot of my time digging into modern inventions, particularly technology, and this gave me a great sense of how high we really do stand on the shoulders of giants. It changed how I think about innovation.

Tell us about a favorite moment.

There were so many! One of the things I enjoyed most was that having a TV crew got me access to all kinds of places, people and things that I couldn’t touch any other way. In particular I met with people who had expertise I could have never imaged; to help draw that out in a way that a camera could capture and share with the world, was a real pleasure.

One of the most enjoyable on-film conversations I had was with a bunch of sheep farmers in the highlands of England. This was a group of seven or eight men who’d been raising and shearing sheep for generations, and some of them had never traveled farther than a few towns away. But their approach to us was the most gracious, most honestly open-minded I’d experienced. We ended up in the pub talking about sheep genealogy and the similarities between Twitter and the parceling of farmland through marriage. The fact that we had almost nothing in common in terms of lifestyle was absolutely irrelevant. It was amazing.

So what’s next for you? Are you going to transition more fully to television, or are you going to skit and skat as you tend to do?

I think skitting and skatting is part of my DNA, but doing The Link really drove home what a significant reach television has. When we were traveling through the Midwestern United States, or even through many places in Asia and Europe, it became clear to me that most people still get the majority of their entertainment and education from television.

TV has its own challenges right now, and the Internet is definitely forcing it to adapt and change. To me that combination — of being able to reach such a significant percentage of the world’s population, and of being able to help shape the future of how media is used — is a pretty heady mix.

Ultimately I’d like to do more shows like The Link, because growing up, watching shows like Nova and Discovery had a huge influence on my own way of thinking. I think this sort of intelligent programming is a big part of what makes people become entrepreneurs and philanthropists and active participants in society. I think the world needs more of that.

At TEDGlobal 2010 Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa introduced us to THE 99, a comic book and animated series featuring a team of 99 young superheroes inspired by the 99 attributes of Allah. These young characters are the world’s first superheroes based on Islamic culture. Earlier this year at TEDGlobal Al-Mutawa discussed the criticisms he received for his creation, both at home and abroad, and the continuing backlash he faces from those accusing him of “radicalizing” young people.

Tomorrow, Saturday, October 22, 2011, THE 99 will have its worldwide online premiere on PBS’ Independent Lens livestream channel, followed by a discussion with Al-Mutawa. Last week Independent Lens premiered a documentary called Wham! Bam! Islam! about the making of and motivations behind the controversial series. Filmmaker Isaac Solotaroff followed Al-Mutawa and his collaborators as they struggled to get — and keep — their show on the air. The film can be purchased and downloaded on iTunes.

Through Wham! Bam! Islam! and continued exposure Al-Mutawa hopes that THE 99 will be able to fulfill its original goal of promoting the positive aspects of his religion to children of all origins and all faiths.

The PBS livestream of THE 99 will be available tomorrow in cities around the world. Note the time in your city >>

9 a.m. Los Angeles
12 p.m. New York
5 p.m. London
7 p.m. Kuwait City, Istanbul, Dublin
8 p.m. Dubai
11 p.m. Jakarta
12 a.m. Sydney, Hong Kong