#lcc10 Matt Pearson - Thh-Tmaa: Rediscovering the Lost Language of the Hive

details & slides: https://conlang.org/lcc10/#pearson
speaker: email pearsonm@reed.edu, https://pearson.conlang.org, Fiat Lingua papers https://fiatlingua.org/tag/matt-pearson/

When I was a graduate student in linguistics at UCLA, I was hired to create the alien ‘Hivespeak’ language for the UFO conspiracy series Dark Skies, which aired on NBC from 1996 to 1997 and was later rebroadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel (Syfy). Canceled after a single season, Dark Skies failed to develop a significant fan base and has now been largely forgotten. As a result the Hive language Thh-Tmaa, which the show runner hoped would attain the same level of notoriety as Klingon among SF conlang enthusiasts, sank into obscurity.

Now, two decades later, I have unearthed my old notes from this project and set about rediscovering the grammatical features of Thh-Tmaa. In addition to describing the structure of the language, I discuss its development and my experiences working as a professional conlanger in Hollywood at a time before Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings movies, when developing conlangs for film and television properties was even rarer than it is today.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Skies

—
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOSXnL88bvWv5AAOWy43J7Jy-Sh7gSF5B
Join the LCS: https://conlang.org/become-a-member/
Captions by @stenoknight.