Here’s an interesting bit of trivia about the Valyrian language in Game of Thrones (via Wikipedia):
To create the Dothraki and Valyrian languages to be spoken in Game of Thrones, HBO selected the linguist David J. Peterson through a competition among conlangers. The producers gave Peterson a largely free hand in developing the languages, as, according to Peterson, George R. R. Martin himself was not very interested in the linguistic aspect of his works. The already published novels include only a few words of High Valyrian, including valar morghulis (“all men must die”), valar dohaeris (“all men must serve”) and dracarys (“dragonfire”). For the forthcoming novel The Winds of Winter, Peterson has supplied Martin with additional Valyrian translations.
Peterson commented that he considered unfortunate Martin’s choice of dracarys because of its (presumably intended) similarity to the Latin word for dragon, draco. Because the Latin language does not exist in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, Peterson chose to treat the similarity as coincidental and made dracarys an independent lexeme; his High Valyrian term for dragon is zaldrīzes. The phrases valar morghulis and valar dohaeris, on the other hand, became the basis of the language’s conjugation system
I’m intrigued by the discussion of the word dracarys and its relation to the English word “dragon,” or the Latin word draco. I’d like to posit an alternate theory, just for the heck of it.
The language most commonly spoken in Westeros is known simply as the Common Tongue, which is presented to us as English. I suppose it’s not really English, but it’s the language we, as the readers/observers of this world, use to perceive events. In Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, he similarly referred to the language used by most of the characters as “Galach,” even though they were pretty obviously all speaking English.
If we consider “dragon” to be a word in the Common Tongue of Westeros, then it makes sense that such a word would develop. The Targaryens, a Valyrian family, invaded Westeros about three hundred years before the events of the books/show. We don’t get any sort of etymological history of the word “dragon,” but as best I can remember, dragonglass (obsidian) and the island of Dragonstone are the only cognates in the Common Tongue. (People in Westeros knew about dragonglass long before the Targaryens arrived, but they might have had a different name for it.)
We also don’t know if the people of Westeros knew all that much about dragons before the Targaryen invasion. Aside from merchants and other sailors, it’s highly doubtful that anyone in Westeros would have ever seen a dragon before the Targaryens invaded. The invasion, it is probably safe to assume, included numerous uses of the command dracarys, so it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if the Common Tongue word “dragon” developed that way. Hearing dracarys likely meant a painful, messy death, and that would be much more likely to stick in people’s minds than a mouthful like zaldrīzes.
Of course, this is pretty much all based on what I learned in an Intro to Linguistics class, in which I think I got a B, more than twenty years ago, so I could be wrong.
