Talk:Black Speech/Archive 1

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"J. R. R. Tolkien created this language with the intention of making it harsh and ugly, although people who speak the European languages that he emulated may disagree with his methods." Which European languages must we think of? Did Tolkien state anything about that? Or did someone else find this out? This Black Speech sample, along with several Orkish words, particularly reminds me of Dzongkha, but that's not European. Caesarion 11:41, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. If anything, it sounds like Turkish to me. Turks/mongols would fit better anyway, as Orcs are based on the --to Europeans-- least lovable features of the race. (According to the Professor himself.) Jordi·✆ 12:12, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

One could think about French and German, as Black Speech share with them the same sound of "r" ([ʁ] I think). Though in their whole, none of these languages significantly sound like Black Speech, as far as I can tell. Faenglor 22:32, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

The û's: Could they define the entire pronunciation of Black Speech?

Were they used to signal a change in morphemes? Or were they simply used to add accent? I support the former, since 'nazg' is a single morpheme, leaving the 'ûl' alone as a single morpheme in 'Nazgûl', of which the meaning is irrelevant. Also this could support the fact that 'atul' is a single morpheme, since the second syllable is not marked. From this point of view, I think that Black Speech has more words that start with vowels and end with consonants, as opposed to latin and germanic roots which normally begin in cosonants and end with vowels, since, in the word 'durbatulûk', it is separated in meaning (and probably in pronunciation as well) as either 'durb|atul|ûk' or 'durb|at|ul|ûk'. So, 'Nazgûl' might be pronounced as (nazg-ul). But, if I'm right about morphemes defining syllables and about 'atul' being a single morpheme, then 'atul' could be pronounced more liberally as either (a-tul) or (at-ul).

Actually gûl is attested alone and translated as "wraith" by Tolkien (see the table in the article, from Tolkien's writings), so Nazgûl "Ringwraith" would then be a straightforward compound of nazg "ring" + gûl "wraith". The circumflex in words like ghâsh "fire" and gûl "wraith" is probably just to mark long vowels, as that's how it works in most of Tolkien's other languages: furthermore Tolkien glosses -at "verb ending, like a participle" and -ul "them" as separate morphemes. We also have the acute used in Lugbúrz "the Dark Tower, Barad-dûr", but I'm inclined to believe that this is just an inconsistent spelling and can safely be treated the same as *Lugbûrz. Double sharp (talk) 21:13, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Link not working

The last of the links, the "Land of Shadows Black Speech" link pointing to http://darktongue.c jb.net/ does not seem to work. -Nemesis1000(at)gmail.com

Lugburz?

I have added "Lugburz" to the Black Speech vocabulary. (It is a word used by the Orcs for the Black Tower, Barad-Dur.) Is this correct? Is Lugburz Black Speech, or is it Orkish? SpectrumDT 20:30, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The root 'burz' also appears in 'burzum' = 'darkness' in the Ring inscription. Thus 'Lugburz' definitely has Black Speech connections. It could be an Orcish derivation thereof, but I'd think that the name of Sauron's home would probably remain in pure Black Speech amongst his servants. --CBD 13:50, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

What's this mean?

Ash Nazg Gimbatul! Ash Nazg Gimbatul! Ash Nazg Gimbatul!

This is the phrase being repeated at the counsil of Elrond. What does Ash Nazg Gimbatul mean? --66.218.23.154 04:39, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Ash = one, Nazg = Ring (as in 'Nazgul' = 'Ringwraith'), and Gimb-at-ul = 'find-to-them'... so, 'One Ring to find them'. It is part of the Ring-inscription. --CBD 13:50, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Source of the curse

While the Article ascribes the Ugluk u bagronk curse to Grishnakh, in fact it is uttered by the yellow-fanged guard, who is killed shortly thereafter: Aragorn will identify the dead as "Northern Orcs," presumably from Moria. LR III/2, 3.

Number of Speakers

Is there any basis for the stated figure or is it just an arbitrary guess?

Table

Where did the table of the translation of the individual morphemes come from? How do we know, for example, that durbatulûk is durb-at-u-lûk with a gloss of "rule-to-them-all", as opposed to, say, dur-ba-tu-lûk with a gloss of "to-rule-them-all"? This information has to come from somewhere. Where's the source? - furrykef (Talk at me) 06:33, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Presumably http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/orkish.htm ... AnonMoos (talk) 09:21, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. The durb-at-ul-ûk scheme comes from comparison with others, like gimb-at-ul, thrak-at-ul-ûk and krimp-at-ul. Therefore, it seems fair to think of durb, gimb, thrak and krimp as the verbs. The at "to" and ul "them" are probably arbitrary, based on glosses (though rather logical to have the verb form complete before appending something), and ûk "all" comes from the comparison between the forms glossed with "all" and the forms not glossed that way (comparison in which everything matches : the ûk forms with the "all" glosses).

By any means, it is still hypothetical and sometimes arbitrary, AFAIK. An other interpretation suggested for example that verb-at would be an "intentive" verb form, as opposed to a infinitive (A second opinion on Black Speech) Faenglor (talk) 10:12, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Gaelic

I was under the impression that the Black Speech was based on a form of Gaelic. --Thejadefalcon^{Sing your song}_{The bird's seeds} 23:58, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, nasc (is it also written nasg?) means 'ring' in Gaelic; beyond that, who can say? —Tamfang (talk) 23:39, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

And in one of his published letters, JRRT replies to a woman who asked the same question. He said something like "Well, although I don't recollect doing it intentionally, I must have taken nazg from Irish nasg." Sorry I can't give a better cite. --Thnidu (talk) 00:07, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Salonia

“ For The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the linguist David Salo used what little is known of the Black Speech to create a Fantasy code. This is Salonian Neo-Black Speech. One word created for the film is ashi - derived from ash ("one") and meaning "only." Two phrases in Salonian Neo-Black Speech appear in the film: Gu kibum kelkum-ishi, burzum-ishi. Akha-gum-ishi ashi gurum. ("No life in coldness, in darkness. Here in void, only death." Gurum means "death" and Gurut means "to die.") ”

We know that Salo composed two sentences. What's the source for the assertion that he "created a Fantasy code" (whatever that means)? What's the source for Gurut? —Tamfang (talk) 19:08, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

"Ergative"

This is very muddled. Nemirovski is evidently "a historian" but no sort of linguist. "Ergative" languages are (simplifying a little) ones where subjects of intransitive verbs have the same "absolute" case inflection as direct objects of transitive verbs, and subjects of transitive verbs are in a separate "ergative" case. There are plenty of languages like this worldwide, though, as it happens, in Europe only Basque. This has nothing to do with whether a verb inflects to agree with a direct object. Many languages do that without being ergative (Cree, Nahuatl - even French in some cases!); and many ergative languages don't have verbs that inflect to agree with objects (Tongan, Tibetan ...) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.155.56.215 (talk) 00:35, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Ergative - again

Agreeing with the previous post about the supposedly ”ergative” suffix: the fact that there is a verbal suffix referring to the object is simply an agreement between the verb and the object (see Agreement (linguistics)), also found for example in Hungarian, which, however, does not display any ergative features, it’s an agglutinative language with nominative-accusative alignment, since its subject is in the nominative and it's object is in the accusative. Ergative means the subject of a transitive verb receives the ergative case, whereas the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb receive the absolutive case (for details see Ergative–absolutive language), and this has nothing to do with verb-oject agreement. Leandro81 (talk) 19:29, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Romanian?

Some features, especially the frequent presence of the -ul suffix, gives Black Speech a rather Romanian feeling to those who know little of either Romanian or the Black Speech.--2001:A61:260C:C01:AD73:5A07:A016:FE2C (talk) 10:05, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Eh, not exactly. Maybe only very superficially in some cases because of that suffix and some of the diacritics. If anything it feels more like some ancient Mesopotamian kind of tongue. I can see why someone suggested Hurrian. Word dewd544 (talk) 03:54, 1 December 2018 (UTC)