A conlanger is someone who invents fictional languages for movies and TV shows, languages like Dothraki, Na'vi, Klingon, or Pornese. Besides turning our escapism into subtitles-ridden reading assignments, the biggest problem with conlanging is that your linguistic baby will ultimately have to be delivered on screen by actors, some of whom will end up dropping it on its head.
For example, in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Christopher Lloyd plays Kruge, a Klingon commander trying to simultaneously murder Kirk and the Klingon language.
Lloyd's Klingon delivery is so wooden and features so many unnecessary pauses between each word that I'm shocked the movie's big twist wasn't that Kruge and Kirk were long-lost twins. Does this make Christopher Lloyd a bad actor? Let me answer that with another question: How dare you? Christopher Lloyd is a goddamn treasure and a powerhouse performer. He just has trouble putting his heart into made-up lines that must sound to him like a jammed printer.
They don't prepare you for this kind of stuff in acting school. Just ask Dan Hildebrand whose Valyrian on Game Of Thrones sounds like, well, like a jammed printer: Clunky, forced, and it makes me want to hit him.
HBO
"Could you give me some pointers?"
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