| Black Speech | |
|---|---|
| Created by | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Date | c. 1945–1973 |
| Setting and usage | Mordor inMiddle-earth |
| Users | None |
| Purpose | Constructed language
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
TheBlack Speech is one of the fictionallanguages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien forhis legendarium, where it was spoken in the evil realm ofMordor. In the fiction, Tolkien describes the language as created bySauron as aconstructed language to be the sole language of all the servants of Mordor.
Little is known of the Black Speech except the inscription on theOne Ring. Scholars note that Tolkien constructed this to be plausible linguistically, and to sound rough and harsh. The scholar Alexandre Nemirovski, on linguistic evidence, has proposed that Tolkien based it on the ancientHurrian language, which like the Black Speech wasagglutinative.
The Black Speech is one of the more fragmentary languages inThe Lord of the Rings. Unlike his extensive work on theElvish languages, Tolkien did not write songs or poems in the Black Speech, apart from the One Ring inscription. He stated that:[1]
Inagglutinative languages likeTurkish, the meaning of a word can be understood by breaking it down into the base word and its word endings. For example, in the wordevlerimizdeev means "house",-ler indicates plurality,-imiz means "our", and-de means "in". Therefore,evlerimizde means "in our houses".
The Black Speech was not intentionally modelled on any style, but was meant to be self consistent, very different from Elvish, yet organized and expressive, as would be expected of a device of Sauron before his complete corruption. It was evidently anagglutinative language. ... I have tried to play fair linguistically, and it is meant to have a meaning not be a mere casual group of nasty noises, though an accurate transcription would even nowadays only be printable in the higher and artistically more advanced form of literature. According to my taste such things are best left to Orcs, ancient and modern.
Tolkien's attitude to the Black Speech is revealed in one of his letters. From a fan, Tolkien received a goblet with the Ring inscription on it in Black Speech. Because the Black Speech in general is an accursed language, and the Ring inscription in particular is a vile spell, Tolkien never drank out of the goblet, and used it only as an ashtray.[3]
The linguist and Tolkien scholarCarl F. Hostetter wrote that the Dark LordSauron created the Black Speech "in a perverse antiparallel of Aulë's creation of Khuzdul for the Dwarves".[4] Sauron attempted to impose Black Speech as the official language of the lands he dominated and all his servants, but in this he was only partially successful.[4][5] Black Speech influenced theOrcs' vocabulary, but soon developed into many Orkish dialects, which were not mutually intelligible. By the end of the Third Age, Orcs mostly communicated using a debasedWestron. Tolkien described one Orc's utterances as being in "the Common Speech, which he made almost as hideous as his own tongue".[6]
The language was used "only inMordor", Tolkien stated, and it was "never used willingly by any other people"; for this reason, "even the names of places in Mordor are in English", representing Westron.[7]
The onlytext of "pure" Black Speech is theinscription upon theOne Ring. It is written in the ElvishTengwar script, with flourishes:[8]
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
(Pronunciationⓘ)
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.[9]
The couplet is from theRhyme of the Rings, a verse describing theRings of Power. This corresponds to the following table as explained by Tolkien.[1]
| Black Speech | Tolkien's English glosses[1] |
|---|---|
| ash | one |
| nazg | (finger-)ring |
| durb- | constrain, force, dominate |
| -at | verb ending, like aparticiple |
| -ulûk | verbal ending expressingobject 3rdpersonplural "them" (ul) in completive or total form "them-all". |
| gimb- | seek out, discover |
| -ul | them |
| thrak- | bring by force, hale, drag |
| agh | and |
| burzum | darkness |
| ishi | in, inside (placed after noun usually in Black Speech). |
| krimp- | bind, tie |
The Black Speech was by Tolkien's real intention, and Sauron's fictional one also, a harshly guttural language "with such sounds as sh, gh, zg; indeed," wrote Hostetter, "establishing this effect, as well as the bits of grammar needed to lend the Ring-inscription linguistic verisimilitude, seems to have been about the extent of Tolkien's work on this language."[4] David Ashford, in theJournal of the Fantastic in the Arts, observes that uniquely among Tolkien's languages, the Black Speech is explicitly aconstructed language devised as unpleasant by Sauron for his Orcs, and described by Tolkien as[10]
so full of harsh and hideous sounds and vile words that other mouths found it difficult to compass, and few indeed were willing to make the attempt[11]
Linguists including Ashford andHelge Fauskanger comment that this is Tolkien's subjective view, as it is difficult to identify which sounds might have been experienced as hideous.[10][12] Fauskanger suggests that the Elves did not like theuvularr employed by the Orcs.[12] The Tolkien scholarTom Shippey writes that the worddurbatulûk, "to rule them all", embodied Tolkien's view thatsound and meaning went together, commenting that[13]
certainly, the harsh vowels and jagged consonants and consonant clusters lend themselves to rough and rasping pronunciation, a fitting evocation of the voices of Orcs.[13]
A few Black Speech words are given in Appendix F ofThe Return of the King. These includeLugbúrz, meaning "Dark Tower" (Barad-dûr),snaga, "slave", andghâsh, "fire". The nameNazgûl is a combination ofnazg meaning "ring" andgûl meaning "wraith(s)", hence "ringwraith".[12]
The only known sample of debased Black Speech/Orkish is inThe Two Towers, where a "yellow-fanged" Mordor Orc curses theIsengardUruk Uglúk:[14]
InThe Peoples of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien gives the translation: "Uglúk to the cesspool, sha! the dungfilth; the greatSaruman-fool, skai!". However, in a note published in the journalVinyar Tengwar, it is translated: "Uglúk to the dung-pit with stinking Saruman-filth, pig-guts, gah!"[14]
For Peter Jackson'sThe Lord of the Rings film trilogy, thelinguistDavid Salo used what little is known of the Black Speech to invent two phrases:[15][16][17]
The wordburzum-ishi ('in darkness') is taken from the Ring Verse, and three other abstract nouns are invented with the same ending–um. The wordashi, meaning 'only', is taken fromash ('one') in the Ring Verse. The other words were made up by Salo.[15]
The Swedish linguist Nils-Lennart Johannesson compared the phonology and syllable structure of the Black Speech with those ofTolkien's two major Elvish languages,Quenya andSindarin. He found that there were moresonorant sounds and moreopen syllables in Elvish than in either English or Black Speech. He stated that these consistent differences were "sufficiently prominent" to make Elvish sound "pleasant and harmonious", whereas Black Speech sounded "harsh and strident".[18]
M. G. Meile, labelling the Black Speech as "Sauron'sNewspeak" by analogy withGeorge Orwell's dystopian language, noted that it was "doubly artificial": where the Elvish languages were Tolkien's invention, the Black Speech was also a constructed language in his invented Middle-earth, since it had been created by the Dark Lord Sauron as an "evilEsperanto" for his slaves. He stated that as the only language of this type in Middle-earth, this made the Black Speech more important than it would appear from the few words Tolkien defined for it. Further, Tolkien wrote that it was made in mockery of Quenya, in other words that it was an evil language shadowing "the linguistic embodiment of good", and indeed, Meile wrote, it had many correspondences with Quenya. For instance, the word forOrcs, the monsters made in mockery of the Elves, is Quenya "urco, orco", which becomes Black Speech "Uruk".[19]
The linguist Joanna Podhorodecka examines thelámatyáve, aQuenya term for "phonetic fitness", of Tolkien's constructed languages. She analyses them in light ofIván Fónagy [hu]'s theory of symbolic vocal gestures that convey emotions. She notes that Tolkien's inspiration was "primarily linguistic"; and that he had invented the stories "to provide a world for the languages", which in turn were "agreeable to [his] personal aesthetic". She compares two samples of Elvish (one Sindarin, one Quenya) and one of Black Speech, tabulating the proportions ofvowels andconsonants. The Black Speech is 63% consonants, compared to the Elvish samples' 52% and 55%. Among other features,front vowel sounds like/i/ (like thei inmachine) are much rarer in Black Speech than in Elvish, whileback vowel sounds like/u/ (like theu inbrute) are much more common. Podhorodecka therefore comments that thephonology of Black Speech is similar to speech affected by aggressive emotions, which has a higher proportion of consonants (especiallyplosives) to vowels. She concludes that Tolkien's constructed languages were certainly individual to him, but that their "linguistic patterns resulted from his keen sense of phonetic metaphor", so that the languages subtly contribute to the "aesthetic andaxiological aspects of his mythology".[20]
The Russian historian Alexandre Nemirovski claimed a strong similarity to the extinctHurrian language of northernMesopotamia,[12] which had recently been partially deciphered at the time of the writing ofThe Lord of the Rings,E. A. Speiser'sIntroduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.[21][22] Fauskanger corresponded with Nemirovski, and notes that Nemirovski argued that Tolkien designed Black Speech "after some acquaintance with Hurrian-Urartian language(s)."[12] The evidence that Nemirovski presented for this is entirely linguistic, based on similarities of the elements of the agglutinative forms of Black Speech; Hurrian was similarly agglutinative.[12]
| Black Speech | English | Hurrian | Meaning in Hurrian (possible Black Speech interpretation) |
|---|---|---|---|
| durb- | to rule | turob- | something predestined to occur (perhaps: an evil destiny) |
| -ûk | completely | -ok- | "fully, really" |
| gimb- | to find | -ki(b) | to take, to gather |
| burz- | dark | wur-, wurikk- | to see, to be blind (perhaps: in the dark) |
| krimp- | to tie | ker-imbu- | to make longer fully (perhaps: if of a rope, to tie tightly) |
Ashford writes that the Black Speech is at once agglutinative andergative, "something of a rarity even now".[10] Further, in the 1940s ergativity was a recent linguistic discovery, so that Tolkien was making use of the newest research in his favourite field. In Ashford's view, given the "striking parallels" in both syntax and morphology, the "mysterious history", and the "topical interest" of Hurrian at that time, the case for a Hurrian connection is persuasive.[10]
Tolkien stated that when coining the Black Speech wordnazg, he might have been influenced by theIrish wordnasc ("ring, fastening, tie").[1] He denied thatnazg had any connection toOld English.[23]
Mark Mandel, writing in theTolkien Journal in 1965, wrote that-ishi is "apostposition of location, or (to borrow a term fromFinnish grammar) aninessive suffix."[24]
Featured in 'The Treason of Isengard'
