The Value of Language - David Peterson & Jessie Sams | Hancock Symposium 2023 (part 2/2)

2023 Hancock Symposium plenary session #1 by David Peterson and Jessie Sams, Language Creators for Film and Television including HBO’s Game of Thrones and Pixar’s Elemental, on "The Value of Language." September 19, 2023, at 9 am in Champ Auditorium.
Language is foundational to human civilization, yet is often taken for granted, both in daily life and in creative endeavors. Language creators David Peterson and Jessie Sams will focus on the role of language in media. They will discuss how the choices made in TV shows, films, books, and even video games help to shape our perceptions of the fictional worlds presented to us, and also have the power to reinforce - or force us to reexamine - our own linguistic biases.
David Peterson is a language creator and author. David is best known for having created the Dothraki and High Valyrian language for HBO’s Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Since then, he has gone on to create languages for many television series and films, including Syfy’s Defiance, Netflix’s The Witcher, Legendary’s Dune, and the CW’s The 100. He is the author of Penguin’s The Art of Language Invention, an intensive introduction to language creation, and the creator of Duolingo’s High Valyrian course. He received a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from UC Berkeley, and a master’s from UC San Diego.
Jessie Sams has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and was a professor of linguistics at Stephen F. Austin State University for 13 years, where she created a conlanging course and taught students how to construct a language from the ground up. She is now a full-time professional conlanger and works with her partner, David Peterson. Her work appears in TV shows and films, including Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, Pixar’s Elemental, Peacock's Vampire Academy, and Freeform's Motherland: Fort Salem. With David she co-hosts the weekly livestream LangTime Studio on RUclips, where they create new languages from scratch and share the process.
The theme of the 2023 Hancock Symposium was "The Languages of Life": the words we speak, the movement of our bodies, the patterns of our DNA, and the characters that are eloquently drawn on pages for us to read are all examples of languages that we live and breathe daily. However, there’s more. How do the trees speak to one another to warn of a coming storm? How do companies persuade you to buy their product? How do politicians use phrasing to earn your vote? How do computers communicate with only zeros and ones and yet form a foundation for society? How does the shared experience of a culture or subculture create a vernacular only understood by its members? How can we foster better communication, by being inclusive and equitable with our words and our actions? This Symposium will engage experts who will help us understand the languages of our lives, and spur us to think carefully about how we choose to communicate with those around us. It will highlight the importance of values, character, lifelong learning, and problem-solving - all key components of a liberal arts education.
2023 symposium: www.wcmo.edu/s...
Westminster College: www.wcmo.edu