David Peterson is paid to make languages for a living and has made many. He’s excellent at it. More importantly, he doesn’t get to do whatever he wants. Sometimes, he’s told to keep to source material, and other times he isn’t. In the end, however, he’s delivering a product to a paying customer. I met him once a linguistics conference, and he’s a sharp guy from what I gathered.
Before making claims about what he did or why he did, you should look him up. He too has degrees, but that shouldn’t make a difference. He’s created a wide variety of languages for many different projects, he founded the language creation society, and in general he gets extremely familiar with the source material for each project in which he’s involved. He’s not a huckster, and he definitely doesn’t focus on marketability of his work beyond his direct customer (though his customers may, but that ain’t on him).
He's not a huckster. I know some of the conlang crowd including him.
What he is, is obsessed with a particular idea of how realistic the process of creating conlangs must be. And in what sense that process must be realistic. Instead of creating languages that please the audience, he creates languages that please the hardcore conlang community. I get it. As a language geek the results are pleasing.
As a Dune fan he did the book and fandom a great disservice and that sucks. He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune. Sometimes realism makes something feel more real and tangible. But at other times it makes it feel pointlessly inaccessible. What's better? One kind of realism for language geeks or the integrity of the author's vision for the story? There's a clear answer for him.
You can only appreciate his work and his choices if you dig deep. And virtually no one does. Even hardcore fans.
There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it. Just like say Hebrew. Or he could declare that it became a liturgical language like Latin or Vedic Sanskrit and so remained unchanged. But that's not language geek fun.
Also his example of Beowulf is, as someone who has published many papers and also taught linguistics, just stupid. That didn't happen to Hebrew or Greek or many other languages. English went through a massive lexicon, grammar, and pronounciation shift right after it. That was an abrupt non linear change in the language. In any case, with just a little practice you can read it far better than you might think.
It's also just false that words can't be observed long periods. Reconstructions of proto-indo-european show that very likely quite a few words hardly changd.
It's really sad that so many projects are picking only him, just like countless movies pick only a few musicians for their scores. The community is large and there are a lot of curious viewpoints and ideas out there.
> He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune
To be fair, Frank Herbert wasn't his client here, the filmmakers were. Occam's razor suggests how the language turned out is in line with the filmmaker's intent.
> There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it.
That's even Frank Herbert's own justification in one of his appendices. Herbert seemed to have dabbled in conlangs a bit more than his contemporaries and put a lot of thought into it and picked the language smashes he did for thematic reasons, but with something of a semi-studious hobbyist eye for language drift. He detailed a lot of those notes in appendices. Given how much JRRT contributed to the conlang field in appendices, it seems surprising a conlang enthusiast would have missed some of the salient points in Herbert's appendices.
Before making claims about what he did or why he did, you should look him up. He too has degrees, but that shouldn’t make a difference. He’s created a wide variety of languages for many different projects, he founded the language creation society, and in general he gets extremely familiar with the source material for each project in which he’s involved. He’s not a huckster, and he definitely doesn’t focus on marketability of his work beyond his direct customer (though his customers may, but that ain’t on him).