Valar

High Valyrian

Source

Coined by George R. R. Martin in the book A Clash of Kings.

Source Spelling

valar

Pronunciation

(Classical) IPA^(key): /ˈvalar/

Noun

valar

1. nominative collective of vala

   Valar morghūlis. (Phrasebook Entry)

   All men must die.

   Valar dohaeris. (Phrasebook Entry)

   All men must serve.

Creation and Usage Notes

There were a number of different ways one might have parsed Valar morghūlis and Valar dohaeris. There is a potential version of High Valyrian out there somewhere in the multiverse that has suffixed adjectives (or determiners), with -ar meaning "all"—a glorious morpheme salad that would bring great comfort to a certain type of person. There was no chance I was ever going to do that. First, I was emboldened by George R. R. Martin's knowledge that not all languages needed to have a one-to-one equivalent of every element in an English sentence—something that becomes quite evident if you analyze all the Dothraki material from the first three Song of Ice and Fire books. I reasoned that I could use this to my advantage to create a literal meaning that differed from the actual meaning of the phrases. Second, I wanted to honor George R. R. Martin's notion that High Valyrian would be the Latin or Greek of his universe. I wanted to create something that was evocative of those languages in precisely the way that an American who hasn't studied them very much might imagine them. This mean there was no way in hell I was creating an agglutinative language, first of all. And second, the thing that strikes one the most about Latin and Greek are the case paradigms and verbal declensions. Even if one doesn't know the word "case" or "aspect", the thing one notices are the -um, -us, -os, -ion, -ae, etc. endings. If you look at the various High Valyrian names from the books (Daenerys, Viserys, Balerion, Maegor, Targaryen, etc.), it's clear those endings are part of what struck Martin as well. I wanted to create a system that supported those endings. In Valar morghūlis and Valar dohaeris, we're dealing with the nominative (unless this was an ergative language, which was something I was never going to do [I'd've been rode out of town on a rail!]), so the cases aren't going to show up, but it gave me the opportunity to instantiate a new paradigm. The fact that we had "all men" here screamed collective, but we also had a number of names that ended in -ar (Rhaegar, Aenar, Maekar), and that gave me an idea. The names would likely be singular, not collective, but what if there was a connection? If I wanted to make valar the product of inflection, it would have a number system that would at least be singular, plural, and collective. This is when I came up with the idea to reinterpret Valyrian number as a combination of basic number and definiteness. This would give us singular vs. plural and definite vs. indefinite. Definite singular is obviously exactly one; definite plural would be the collective (all men); indefinite plural would be the regular plural we know (men, but it could be two, could be twenty), so what would the indefinite singular be? And that, of course, is the paucal: Some small number, but we don't know how many exactly. This is how the number system of Valyrian was born. I might not have thought anything of it had there not been names like Rhaegar and Maekar whose endings matched valar—something I'm sure was entirely coincidental. This also, though, suggested a gender system. Because if the singular of valar was going to be vala, it suggested a connection between whatever mass nouns gave birth to Rhaegar and the lot and their count versions, which would terminate in -a. Add to that the many o themed names (Balerion, Maegor, Baelon, Aegon, Daemon), and I came up with a new cross section: mass vs. count and theme A vs. theme B (these latter being vocalic themes that are more or less arbitrary). Combining those, I came up with four genders. But what to name them? Given the makeup of these genders, if I had gone masculine-feminine, it would have been, I guess, masculine count and feminine count vs. masculine mass and feminine mass. Perhaps it would have been animate and inanimate. It didn't make a lot of sense, and didn't fit, given that you had both male and female names ending in almost everything (the only exception being -a, which it's really hard to shake Westerners from, despite the fact that the -a ending in nearby Hindi is masculine). This is when something from my old Arabic days suggested itself. In Arabic, there are two classes of letters—sun and moon letters—that determiner the nature of the definite article. In reality, they are glyphs that stand for coronal (sun) vs. non-coronal (moon) consonants, but what speaker group's going to recognize that? Instead, they came up with these arbitrary terms, based on the fact that the Arabic word for "sun" () begins with a coronal consonant ( [ʃ]), and the Arabic word for "moon" () begins with a non-coronal consonant ( [q]—also the middle consonant for each one is [m]!). They could've chosen anything at all in the world that fit these characteristics, but they chose sun and moon because they're evocative and memorable. Turning to Valyrian, I saw an opportunity to create names that were evocative of the fact that each class has something in common with two of the three other classes. Thus, I turned theme A nouns into lunar and aquatic, and theme B nouns into solar and terrestrial. This seemed perfect, because the sun and moon are count nouns; water and earth are mass nouns; the moon and tides are connected; and the sun is what gives life and energy to everything that grows on the land. This fit perfectly—and allowed me to neatly sidestep the unfortunate confusion between human sex and grammatical gender. Given the whole valonqar/"Prince who was promised" thing, I thought it would be ideal to be able to throw most of the words referring to humans in one grammatical gender—and, indeed, most are lunar. All in all, despite the fact that there were only two full sentences of High Valyrian containing a total of three words, I was able to get a lot of mileage out of them. Even if this may not have been what George R. R. Martin planned or envisioned, I think it works pretty well. Also, given how daunting it felt to try to learn Latin way back when, I felt pretty good about coming up with something that could sit next to Latin at the kids table at Thanksgiving if all the seats at the main table were taken. -David J. Peterson 23:57, 22 February 2020 (PST)