Erlisle SAW LOUIS 😭

A slave trader spent three episodes of Game of Thrones calling Daenerys a bitch and a whore right to her face, because he was positive she didn't speak his language. Turns out it was her family's language. He was speaking a busted, watered-down version of it, and the guy HBO hired to invent it made it that way on purpose. HBO brought in a linguist named David J. Peterson to turn George R.R. Martin's handful of made-up words into real, working languages. He built High Valyrian as the language of a fallen empire, the one Targaryens were raised on, with eight grammatical cases and four genders. Then he built the slaver's dialect as whatever's left after a few centuries in a slave city. Most of the cases got stripped out, and the four genders collapsed into two. Peterson has joked that making it meant taking a bat to the pretty, proper original. So up to this point, every line of Valyrian you'd heard on the show came out of this guy's mouth, in the busted version, while his translator quietly cleaned up his insults into something polite. When Daenerys finally answers him, that's the first time anyone on Game of Thrones speaks real High Valyrian beyond a stock phrase. It took 24 episodes to get there. And Peterson slipped one more detail into her line that most people never caught. When she says "a dragon is not a slave," she uses buzdari, the slaver's word for slave, and skips her own word, dohaeriros. That's the same root as Valar Dohaeris, "all men must serve," which is what the season premiere was called. She grabbed his word on purpose, so the second it left her mouth he'd know she caught every insult since the day she walked into his city. The producers were honestly nervous about shooting it, between how many people they needed on set and how much effects work goes into a dragon that doesn't exist. Alex Graves, in his first time directing the show, got it done in two or three days. They said a movie would've needed eight. And those walls behind her are Ridley Scott's Jerusalem from Kingdom of Heaven, still standing at a studio outside Ouarzazate in Morocco. Emilia picked up her first Emmy nomination that year. By the time the dragon opens its mouth, Kraznys has already lost. She beat him with one word from his own vocabulary.