So I was in my Sanskrit Independent Study yesterday, when my professor commented on the unseasonably cold weather by saying, "It's almost like winter is coming." I stared for a moment, and then asked her if she watches Game of Thrones. Her response: "I read. I don't have time for TV." We proceeded to "waste" the next ten minutes of class time discussing Book 4 of Game of Thrones (I won't spoil from the book, but STOP reading if you're not up to date on the show).
So in honor of having an intensely serious classics professor who can also engage in a deep discussion of Game of Thrones, the following is a Sanskrit vocabulary of Game of Thrones terms (in Sanskrit alphabetical order, of course). Now you can have deep discussions of Game of Thrones with your friends in Sanskrit, which I'm sure was a void in all of your lives. Enjoy!
A completely different set of cultural values here, but both the Dothraki and ancient speakers of Sanskrit put a pretty great emphasis on horse sacrifices. Kings used to perform this ceremony to guarantee prosperity throughout the entire realm for years to come.
The King in the North! The King in the North!
I combined the word for "bunch of flowers" with the word for "soldier" to throw this together.
Everyone's favorite wedding! Added bonus - "dhumra" can mean purple, smoky, or dark red as an adjective, but as a noun can refer to sin, evil or wickedness.
You'll notice I had no idea how to translate Jon, so just transliterated it. Snow was easier.
This is a weird sentence. First, it has no verb. As my professor says, if you give a Sanskrit sentence a good shake, the "be" verbs will fall off. It's just a list of adjectives with the noun (night) at the end. I combined "Bhī," fear, and "Purńa," full, to mean full of terrors, and added the particle "hi," which has no related part of speech in English but is basically just thrown on there for extra meaning, in this case meaning "for."
There are better words for white than "pańdura," but most of them mean pure or radiant where as this one refers to a sickly, pale color. Much better for the White Walkers, I think.
So Sanskrit does this really interesting thing called compounds, where you can just smush words together and have them become one super word with a meaning that incorporates all the parts. One type of compound, called a बहुव्रीहि or bahuvrīhi, is where they mean something like "the thing that has these words". So for dragon, I went with "the thing with fiery breath." It's a compound of prāńam, meaning breath, and pāvakah, meaning fire.
Everyone's (second) favorite Lannister. This looks super weird because "r" can be a vowel in Sanskrit. Technically we have "r" as a vowel sound in English as well, we just don't think of it that way. Take any word that ends in "-er" and say it out loud and you'll realize that the "r" makes up much more of the vowel sound than any kind of "e."
There are about a billion different ways to say both king and hand in Sanskrit, but these two are the ones I know best.
As above, there are again about a billion different ways to say each of these words. Sanskrit really loves synonyms.
This one works particularly well, because lohita can be the adjective meaning red OR the noun meaning blood. A match made in heaven.
It wouldn't be Game of Thrones if winter wasn't on its way.
Three languages here, for added fun. The slogan for Season 4 promises lots of fun...
The guiding statement for the whole series, pretty much. Simhāsanasya is an interesting word - it combines the "lion" (simha) and "seat" (āsana). Both of those Sanskrit words are pretty familiar, Simha being the origin of Simba, who was a HUGE part of my childhood, and āsana doubles as the word for pose in yoga.
Everyone's favorite sword, which recently made its dramatic reappearance in Arya's hands to open Season 4. This word can also refer to a specific style of dancing. Water-dancer, anyone?!?
Hodor hodor! Hodor... hodor hodor.