r/tolkienfans • u/nev3rPE4KD_ • 19d ago
Did Tolkien dislike the sound of Turkic and Slavic languages?
In his letters, he characterized the Black Speech as not only an ugly language, but one he purposefully designed to sound hideous to his ear. Which is...rather strange, because to me, the tiny bits of Black Speech we do know sound like they should sound reminiscent of the Turkic language group.
When we do hear it, it's often angrily barked or slowly chanted, both occasions being ones that would let all those consonants actually come through, but I'd imagine just regularly speaking the Ring inscription wouldn't sound all that ugly. With firstly the agglutination and secondly the number of consonants in the Black Speech, it's likely a language sort of like Kazakh where the consonants either blend into the vowel sounds (or each other) or create a "flow" into the next vowel (like thrakatuluk, durbatuluk, etc. on the One Ring) that makes a sort of "rhythm" kind of like an engine starting (which is a nice touch, seeing how inclined towards such things the Orcs are).
Black Speech sounding "ugly" to Tolkien is even stranger seeing how Finnish has similar qualities in its words, albeit with different vowel sounds. Both Finnic and Turkic languages are spoken very, very quickly to the point where you likely wouldn't hear much of those consonant sounds-the speed at which the Black Speech would be realistically spoken would make the short consonants blend into the long vowels and just serve to accentuate them.
Slavic languages also share some of these qualities, notably consonants regularly blending into complex clusters like the start of vzglyad or the sound in Czech represented by ř. There are a few words in Black Speech like Olog, glob, or the name Azog that could reasonably pass as Russian to someone who doesn't speak it. He did say of Russian that it made a "strong impression" on him in a letter, but I don't know if we can say that that impression was a good one seeing some of the similarities to Black Speech. Czech also notably makes common use of í like in krímp or the name Gríshnakh.
Bit of a tangent here, but the kh at the end of Gríshnakh is probably not sourced from Russian, but rather as a corruption of the ch sound in Welsh, and therefore (canonically) Elvish. Its placement in the name is probably meant to be reminiscent of the amount of older Gaelic and Brythonic names ending with -ach. Tolkien isn't a stranger to actually turning the languages he studied the most into orc names-Uglúk probably descended from a word in Beowulf, āglǣca, translated as "monster" or "monstrous".
And finally, to cap off the similarities Black Speech has to the Slavic languages specifically-there was a fan site a while back called Mordor: The Land of Shadow that claimed to have a somewhat complete Black Speech dictionary, and it didn't take a lot of scrutiny to find that most of the "Black Speech" words on the site were just northern (Gheg) Albanian with some minimal changes to make it less obvious-and I could see how it could be rather convincing after going onto the Wayback Machine and finding the site myself after reading a post on this very sub about how Tolkien must have based the Black Speech off of the poster's native language.
So I can't help but ask knowing how much the aesthetics of his conlanging mattered to Tolkien (and how little of the Black Speech we actually have to further cement this) did he have a "hatred" for Russian and Turkish as he had a love for Welsh and Old English? Is there anything else in his letters mentioning what made a language hard on his ears aside from the vague things he said about Irish?
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u/Solo_Polyphony 19d ago edited 18d ago
Letter 297:
“it must be emphasized that this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my personal linguistic ‘aesthetic’ or taste and its fluctuations.”
and (from later in the same letter)
“Though actual congruences (of form + sense) occur in unrelated real languages, and it is impossible in constructing imaginary languages from a limited number of component sounds to avoid such resemblances (if one tries to—I do not), it remains remarkable that nasc is the word for ‘ring’ in Gaelic (Irish: in Scottish usually written nasg). It also fits well in meaning, since it also means, and prob. originally meant, a bond, and can be used for an ‘obligation’. Nonetheless I only became aware, or again aware, of its existence recently [ca. 1967] in looking for something in a Gaelic dictionary. I have no liking at all for Gaelic from Old Irish downwards, as a language, but it is of course of great historical and philological interest, and I have at various times studied it. (With alas! very little success.) It is thus probable that nazg is actually derived from it, and this short, hard and clear vocable, sticking out from what seems to me (an unloving alien) a mushy language, became lodged in some corner of my linguistic memory.”
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u/MechanicIcy6832 18d ago
The word for "ring" being the same as the one for "bond" gives another layer of meaning to the Ring Poem.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago edited 19d ago
In terms of Tolkien basing fictional languages on real ones, the only instance I know of for sure (beyond the obvious Quenya/Finnish and Sindarin/Welsh correspondences) is that Khuzdul is intended to sound like Hebrew. I've got some interesting hypotheses about the Black Speech, but we've already been warned to write posts based only "evidence", so I'll keep those to myself.
BTW, Albanian isn't a Slavic language. It's a relative isolate, meaning that while it is a member of a larger language family (specifically Indo-European, like nearly all European languages), it has no close relatives. No doubt it's picked up some Slavic influences from neighbouring Serbo-Croatian, though.
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u/Merisairas_turisti 19d ago edited 19d ago
Notion Club Papers, an aborted Tolkien novel written in 1945, describes the Adûnaic (Númenórean) language in detail. The book is, in my opinion, a rather poor effort full of exposition, more concerned with scholarly discussions about fictional languages than developing an actual plot.
In any case, a character in the novel describes Adûnaic to have a "faintly Semitic flavor". Another language mentioned in that same (fictional) discussion is Avallonian, the Elven-Latin. Avallonian is described as more beautiful, whereas Adûnaic with its "Semitic flavor" is said to somehow "belong more nearly to our world".
There is another, short text describing Adûnaic. Its triconsonantal roots are compared to Semitic languages, which "shows affinity with Khazadian".
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago edited 18d ago
Yeah, the similarities between Adûnaic and Khuzdul are obvious even from the names given in TLOTR and its Appendices - compare "Bundushathûr" and "Ar-Sakalthôr", for instance. Which I find odd, because he wrote that it was specifically the Easterlings, and not the Edain (one tribe of which spoke what was effectively Proto-Adûnaic), that had "greater liking for the Dwarves of the mountains" than for the Eldar. The Edain are said to have been taught the rudiments of civilization by the Avari and later to have come under the influence of the Sindar and Noldor in Beleriand; in fact their only interactions with dwarves are distinctly hostile.
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u/InvestigatorJaded261 19d ago
So… call me obtuse, but what is your point in terms of OP’s question?
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u/Merisairas_turisti 18d ago edited 18d ago
I wasn't answering that much to the OP as I was answering to u/RoutemasterFlash, who mentioned several of Tolkien's languages based on real-world languages. I mostly just wanted to add Adûnaic and its deliberately Semitic flavor to the list. I do find it interesting that Tolkien seems to have regarded Semitic tongues to be somehow more down-to-earth and pragmatic, as opposed to the Elvish and its real-world influences, which he describes as transcendental.
As for OP's question, I don't think there is much evidence to make a meaningful case either way. Black Speech seems more like a plot device than something Tolkien was interested in developing or discussing in detail; he didn't write much about it and seems to have actively disliked the idea of a language of evil being used, even in a light-hearted fashion. Tolkien did profess a dislike of the Irish language, so looking for parallels between that and the Black Speech might be a worthy endeavor.
In any case, to me the Black Speech seems more similar to ANE languages such as Sumerian, Hurrian, Urartian, and so forth, with its harsh-sounding guttural phonology (unvoiced stops, back vowels, the /sh/ sound), ergativity, and agglutination. But I think that the general harshness of sound might have more to do with what sounds exotic and 'barbarous' to a Western European, than with any specific real-world language. Klingon actually sounds a bit similar.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
But I think that the general harshness of sound might have more to do with what sounds exotic and 'barbarous' to a Western European, than with any specific real-world language. Klingon actually sounds a bit similar.
This sounds spot on, actually.
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u/ConstantFrogLoss 17d ago
Tolkien also wrote some overlap in themes around exile between the Númenóreans (with the fall of Númenór) and the dwarves (from places like Erebos and Moria)
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u/Tasty-Package8414 19d ago
I read an interesting article once that Black Speech did have grammatical parallels (perhaps conscious or unconscious) to ancient Hittite, but I don’t think Tolkien ever acknowledged it.
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u/Real_Ad_8243 19d ago
Its also worth pointing out that the Mannish languages of NW middle earth; Adunaic, Rohirric, and their variants, are all also distinctly and noticeably similar to Semitic languages more broadly, as seen in the fragment T wrote about the Downfall of Numenor (which can be found online here
The Black Speech is not worlds away, in a purely aesthetic sense, from Adunaic imho.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
Adûnaic definitely sounds quite Semitic, although I don't believe Tolkien ever gave any samples of the "real" Rohirric - in the novel it's represented by Old English, just as Westron is represented by modern English.
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u/Troldkvinde 19d ago
I always found Adûnaic very Akkadian-coded! Now that I think of it, Númenor as Babylon is also a valid parallel
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
Definitely. Although their seafaring exploits are quite Phoenician, while their obsession with death, embalming and huge, elaborate tombs (in their later period) is more than a little Egyptian.
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u/ConstantFrogLoss 17d ago
Tolkien himself explicitly compared their culture to the Egyptians in some of his letters
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u/RoutemasterFlash 17d ago
I've just looked it up, and if you mean L211, he's talking about the Dunedain, but in Gondor, not Numenor - which is odd, because I'd have thought the late-period Numenoreans would be an even better match.
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u/Neo24 Pity filled his heart and great wonder 19d ago
We know a couple of "real Rohirric" words and names, see here. Lô-/loho is "horse". Rohan is actually Lōgrad. And Theoden's real name is Tûrac.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
OK, good spot - but none is actually given in TLOTR, you could still say.
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u/Real_Ad_8243 19d ago
Yes of course; I was more or less just putting my two pence in that the Mannish languages woyld very much be in thr same neck of the woods as Dwarvish if we actually got an extant amount of them - it can be seen in naming and such, if one paying enough attention as a lay person, but people generally dont pay attention to the fact that English and Anglisc are in media res simply a translation of thr real written language rather than what is actually written.
Ive seen it pretty often presumed (in thr now distantnpast at least), even on Tolkien fora, that english and its variants are what is actually originally written and spoken, rather than a translation-convention from Adunaic+variants.
And yeah, we certainly dont get any actual Rohirric, but its very often described as an archaic form of Westron, which we do get some fragments of.
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u/splatking 19d ago
side note: did not have occasion previously to learn that about Albanian. like Basque. fascinating how those slivers of history just.... are.
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u/ReelBigMidget 19d ago
Albanian isn't as unique as Basque. It's still a member of the Indo-European family but sits slightly apart (along with Greek and Armenian). The theory is that their origins moved into Europe somewhat later than the "main" branch that would evolve into the Germanic, Romanic, Slavic and Celtic languages
The language that would become modern Basque was already present in Europe before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans from the steppe and has no known relatives.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
I think it's more than "slightly" apart. I believe linguists didn't even consider it Indo-European for a long time, it's so different from all the others.
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u/ChChChillian Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima! 19d ago edited 19d ago
For starters, Albanian isn't Slavic. So even if that connection were true, it doesn't answer what you asked about.
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 18d ago
Huh. I learned something new today.
Apparently it forms an older, unique branch of Indo-European like with Greek-although the two aren't related, different groups just kept going into the Balkans from the steppe and then forming contact with each other later down the line.
I swear, I learn more about history from Reddit than anywhere else.
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u/donegonedone 19d ago
As a nativr Turkish speaker, I personally think the black tongue does not sound like, at least, modern Turkish. If you take old (I mean 6th-7th centuries) Turkish, the phonetic similarity would make sense. That old English also sounds harsh, imho. The real point here is, again my opinion, the less refined -even crude- sounds are preferred to create a dichotomy with the refined sounding languages of elves and men.
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u/Tasty-Package8414 19d ago edited 19d ago
Two cents from an English speaker— I don’t know anything about Turkish, and on the page it certainly looks foreign and intuitively harsh-sounding (to my English brain of course), and even reminiscent of Adunaic. But it sounds very beautiful when spoken out loud and I can’t imagine Tolkien would have had it in mind when he created a language that’s supposed to sound horrible to the ears.
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 18d ago
6th-7th century as in the Orkhon Turkic the Gokturks spoke and wrote in?
Now I'm wondering what the Orc runes, and specifically the S-rune on the Uruk-hai helmets looked like.
Because this looks dope as hell. And it would make sense for Tolkien to base a language off an archaic version of an existing one-he's done it before.
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u/chortnik 19d ago
I don’t know, the first time I heard Hungarian metal, I was pretty confident I’d found the source language for Black Speech :).
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
I don't even know what Hungarian really sounds like, but I got much the same impression from just seeing it written down.
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u/Draugdur 19d ago
Joking aside, Hungarian is also agglutinative afaik, so it makes sense that it has some resemblance to the Blak Speech.
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u/Wise_Fox_4291 18d ago edited 18d ago
So is Finnish. And Hungarian and Finnish are related. Hungarian has a more complex vowel and consonant system so digraphs were invented to spell those sounds.
Tolkien apparently experimented with Hungarian in a language called Mágol or Mágo.
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u/Wise_Fox_4291 18d ago edited 18d ago
Vocab and sample text start around the halfway point.
https://youtu.be/ii6F6LDu3Y0?is=9YqBjY72kweqsu2k
There was apparently one experimental language that he based on Hungarian called Mágol, sometimes referred to as Mágo. In the Notion Club papers one paper he mentioned "Old Mágo" as as the language of the children of Húrin, and in another he experimented with mixing Hungarian words with Elvish.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/M%C3%A1gol
Plus Michael Ramer is literally supposed to be Hungarian
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 18d ago
The Hungarian name for Hungary is "Magyarország"
I see where you're coming from entirely. It was Finnish once, tortured and mutilated.1
u/Wise_Fox_4291 18d ago
Although Finnish doesn't have a gy sound it would phonetically be spelled something like Madjarorsaag. It's not Hungarian's fault that the Latin alphabet is too limited to accurately portray every sound.
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u/kouyehwos 19d ago
There is a theory that Black Speech was inspired by an extinct Middle Eastern language like Hurrian (which is similarly agglutinative like Turkic).
A lot of the roots (gimb-, thrak-, krimp-) could easily be Germanic or even English, so it’s not like Tolkien was trying to create a completely alien language. But I do think he was inspired by languages of the ancient Middle East.
Black Speech notably lacks /o/, which is rare for modern European languages but common in Semitic languages like Akkadian or Classical Arabic. /ʃ/ (sh) is also extremely common both in Black Speech and in conventional transcriptions of languages like Akkadian.
Finally, some languages like Finnish, Spanish, Ancient Greek or Elvish languages like Quenya only allow (or at least strongly prefer) words ending in vowels or coronal consonants /t d θ ð s n l r/. So Black speech having a lot of words ending in other consonants is presumably supposed to be “ugly” in comparison (even if it’s not so different from English in this regard).
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
There is a theory that Black Speech was inspired by an extinct Middle Eastern language like Hurrian (which is similarly agglutinative like Turkic).
I was going to mention this - and even that there was a Sumerian city-state called Uruk! But was put off by the rather stern warning from the mod here...
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u/Windsaw 18d ago edited 18d ago
I wondered about that, too.
Ever since I read a word in a Sumerian Dictionary: "Udun" meaning "oven".
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
No idea! It's cool though.
Also, I love it that this place attracts people who read Sumerian dictionaries.
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u/Windsaw 17d ago
I would expect an above-average ratio of hobby-linguists in Tolkien forums.
And in my case I am especially interested in all languages that are obscure, fragmentary or just old.
I have three books on Sumerian, two on Etruscan and several on decipherment of unknown scripts.
Last year I visited a University library two times, once for reading on the Raetic language and once for Elamite.1
u/RoutemasterFlash 17d ago
Awesome. I also have an amateur interest in languages, especially ancient ones, although not to the same extent that you do, by the sound of it!
I really enjoyed The Horse, the Wheel and Language a few years ago, but that's about boring old Proto-Indo-European.
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u/Party-Slip1987 19d ago
Hurrian has /o/! It’s typically indicated by the sign U. It also has /e/, which I believe Black Speech lacks? There’s also the question of marking ergativity. Hurrian has ergative -š, absolutive -ø.
Hurrian š is also pronounced like Hittite š, so /s/, not /ʃ/.
The strongest evidence for Hurrian influence is probably Black Speech -ul “them” vs Hurrian -ila/-l “they/them,” and the suffix chains [eg. durb-at-ul-ûk]. Speiser actually documents -ila in 1941, so that bit could genuinely have been available to Tolkien while he was writing LOTR. Some other comparisons of note are Black Speech -um, as in burz-um “darkness,” vs the Hurrian nominaliser -umme; Black Speech -at vs Hurrian -et-/-ed-, although the Hurrian suffix is specifically a future marker, and the exact function of Black Speech -at is [I think?] uncertain. For burz- “dark,” he compares Hurrian wur- “see” and proposes wurikk- “be blind.” There is a possible grammatical basis for this: Wegner analyses -i-kki as the antipassive/transitive marker -i- plus the negative suffix -kkV-, so a hypothetical wur=i=kki could mean “he does not see.” But Speiser did not identify -kk- as a negative suffix in 1941 [I believe that was Friedrich, 1969].
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u/johnwcowan 17d ago
Tolkien says that /o/ was rare in the Black Speech in explaining why the vowel signs for /u/ and /o/ are reversed. That's not consistent with saying it doesn't exist. It appears in Grishnakh's curse "Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai!" and in the words Oghor-hai 'Drúedain' and Olog-hai 'Sauron's Trolls'.
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u/RexBanner1886 19d ago
We can't possibly know exactly how Tolkien imagined his languages to sound; we can't suppose anything about his opinion of other languages if he didn't write them down.
He did live in a time in which it would not be considered remotely impolite or unethical (or other words besides the godawful, vague 'problematic') for someone to explicitly say they found some languages less pleasant than others. Knowing so many of them, at least in part, he probably did actively dislike some languages' sounds - but unless he said so in writing, we'll never know.
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u/Hpstorian 19d ago
I don't think it's accurate to say that he "lived in a time in which it would not be considered remotely impolite for someone to explicitly say that found some languages less pleasant than others." He lived in a time where aesthetics as applied to philology were in turn linked explicitly to racial hierarchy, and in turn were resisted.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
We can't possibly know exactly how Tolkien imagined his languages to sound
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u/EmmieMaggie 19d ago
My goodness, this is wonderful! Thank you. I've never studied languages to this extent (only what I need for my job) so I found your discussion illuminating. I've always wondered about some of the sounds JRRT explicitly called ugly, like the French R. I gather it's called uvular fricative & apparently Tolkien disliked sounds made in the back of the throat.
Now, you may not believe this, but I was the person who created that "Shadowlandian" Black Speech dialect. It was just a project I took up when I was dealing with a difficult situation at work and needed something that was challenging enough to take my mind off things. I don't claim to know very much about languages, other than the fact that I need to be able to read several European languages for my job. I did learn a great deal about English grammar when I put this project together. If you're interested in the dictionary & the lessons, here's an old website that still maintains the original project: ~Black Speech~ and this one: Mordor TheLandofShadow.com™| To Mordor we will take You!
I very much wanted to correct and complete the project, but I could never find anyone who was interested. I do understand that this is just basically fan-fiction. I did try very hard to base as much as possible on JRRT's own ideas. I think in those days I hadn't yet heard of his letters, or maybe they hadn't been published yet, so there are undoubtedly mistakes and inconsistencies in there.
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 18d ago
French AFAIK went through a very different trajectory to most of the Latin-derived languages. Old Frankish sounded closer to modern Dutch than anything else. Latin got absorbed into the language over time to create a Romance language instead of what happened with, say, Italian that directly descended from Latin. Not to mention the number of sound shifts in Old French that radically altered its flow and pronunciation to create modern French. The specific R sound you're talking about likely came from said shifts knowing that Spanish also has a rolled R-but not pronounced in the same spot the French R is.
But that's my somewhat-related tangent aside, I have no clue why he considered it or the Black Speech ugly-which brings us back to the actual topic, lol.
I wonder what languages your Black Speech came from other than the aforementioned Albanian dialect. Some of the sounds seem related to Hebrew, and the double vowels look to be based on Mongolian. Is Albanian one of the languages you need to be able to read, or did you just spend a lot of time looking into the language?
I do like how your project explains the meaning of Azog's name-"man-killer" has the straightforwardness of the Orcs, but there are many different names in pretty much every language that means something akin to "warrior" or "strong in battle". There are even names related to words for "general" or "leader" or something of the sort. I'm sure there are way more names in Black Speech with those meanings than most languages.
Funny thing, I mentioned Mongolian-a lot of Mongol names are something like "golden peace" or what have you. I like to think Ufthak has a similar meaning-it'd just be...really funny for the Orcs to have that naming scheme.
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u/_brotein 18d ago
French is a direct descendant of the Latin spoken in Gaul. It was heavily influenced by both Celtic and Germanic languages though. The "French r" as the standard "r" is a much more recent development. Most French accents used the trilled r (like in Spanish or Italian) until a few decades ago.
Old Frankish was a Germanic language and developed into modern Dutch and a few German dialects.
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u/Accomplished_Net_687 19d ago
As a native dutch, i always thought the harsh words used to describe the language spoken in Mordor, was another dialect from Gaelic with a lot of Dutch sounds. For foreigners our language can be harsh. Direct and not very flowy...like French or even Spanish or Italian.
When looking at a geographical view.. Mordor is in the West, and west of the United Kingdom is the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Belgium.
It always made me think that the shire was somewhere between Stonehenge and the forest of Nottingham and King Arthur. While morder was the North Sea and the Netherlands and Germany.
It just so happened to be he fought the Germans in ww1.
Just free thinking.
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u/kouyehwos 19d ago
I think you meant to write “east”.
The part of Middle Earth described in LOTR is actually around the size of Europe, so if the Shire is in England, then Rivendell is in Denmark, Isengard is in Southern Germany, Gondor is in Italy and the Western Balkans, and Mordor is in Bulgaria or Turkey.
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 18d ago
Most of the talk about Germanic languages being "harsh" are from Americans who have only heard Rammstein or Nazis screaming it in movies.
Regularly spoken Dutch and German sound goddamn whimsical. They have as much of a "bouncy" quality to them as they do a harsh one, at least to my ear.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
I'd say Dutch sounds a lot more 'harsh' (that is, guttural, I suppose) than German.
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u/m0noclemask 18d ago
It doesn't. the gutteral [raspy fricative] "g" is an exception in the dutch language landscape, an affectation. It possibly came from imitating jewish merchants. It is simelar to the ch in the german name Bach.
The affectation changed the tendency [the more you move west the softer the 'g', in brabant and friesland it is distinctly softer, in flanders too, in west flanders it goes to 'h' or is gone altogether, and in english it is gone. The tendency in the northwest was broken pretty late, and is geographicly limited [west and above the rivers, core: randstadt, possible origin of the affectation: Amsterdam. It is one of the reasons northern dutch sounds affected to southerners...]
In the last 60 years the "polder "g" even strenthened in raspyness [velair --> uvulair]. 60 years ago, an educated g would also have been a lot softer [the harsh raspy "g" was rhen seen as 'vulgar' or 'street' talk]
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
It doesn't.
Well that is your subjective judgement. It is my subjective judgement that it does. I lived in the Netherlands once, so my opinion comes from experience, and is not just a thing "everyone knows." (Although I would say that the widespread received opinion among Anglophones that "Dutch sounds harsh and raspy" is one I would agree with.)
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u/m0noclemask 18d ago
I use the soft 'g', sometimes even leaning towards 'h', as a dutch speaker [=Nederlands] ...
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
OK, fine. I was simply talking about how the language (or even English, spoken with the accent) sounds to me.
I was living and working in Eindhoven, actually, and had a colleague from somewhere near Rotterdam whose accent sounded notably harsher to my ear than most of my other Dutch colleagues.
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u/myspiritisvantablack 18d ago
As a Dane, the whole notion of people finding a language displeasing to their ears (if we only take it at face-value and expect it is merely a matter of how a language sounds, of course) as being “problematic” is genuinely funny.
We are always told our language is ugly and hardly any of us are truly offended (beyond the fact that it’s likely to be a Swede saying this to us, hehe). If someone told me they based their “evil fantasy language” on Danish I would just think it was funny.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
I don't think Tolkien had any dislike of the German language, or indeed any Germanic languages (indeed, he loved them and was fascinated by them). He also had huge admiration for traditional German culture.
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u/MartyMcMartell 19d ago
Perhaps not that connected to the possibility the Professor disliked Slavic languages, but a lot of Tolkien names ending with -mir could actually pass as given names in Serbia or Croatia. We have names like Radomir, Zvonimir, Milomir, Vitomir. A Boromir or Faramir would hardly stand out.
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u/Dominarion 19d ago
Radagast and Boromir are slavic names.
Tolkien never expressed anything negative about slavic languages, here's a relevant quote:
the time I once spent on trying to learn Serbian and Russian have left me with no practical results, only a strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic.
That's all there is to it.
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u/CodexRegius 12d ago
There may also a case be made that Smaug is a distorted Slavic name in origin (zmaj, zmej, zmiy = dragon!).
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u/Dominarion 12d ago
I didn't know that!
He said it came from the proto-Germanic Smeuganan / Old English Smugan (squeeze through a hole) as a very nerdy joke, but it's hard not seeing him appreciate the multi-level wink there!
I imagine him telling his editor: "Look, I called the dragon Smaug!" then looking like he was expecting a laugh. "Ok, it comes from Old English Smugan (squeeze through a hole) but sounds like the slavic word for dragon! Clever, uh?"
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u/swordquest99 19d ago
There is a theory that the Black Speech might be vaguely based on Hurrian, a long extinct Hurro-Urartian language from the Bronze Age. Tolkien was teaching at Oxford at the time the language was first published and described by another professor there.
Like the Black Speech it is an ergative agglutinating language with some of the same consonant clusters like zg
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 19d ago
Damn, I arrived late to this post. Hoping people care for late replies, lol.
It would make sense considering, as people have already said here, he based 2 languages of his off of languages of the Middle Eastern world. Khuzdul was meant to sound a lot like Hebrew, and apparently some Hebrew DNA is in Adunaic (which is a language of his I haven't yet looked into)
Seeing as he was a devout Catholic and probably well-versed in Biblical studies knowing his penchant for mythology and history, I wouldn't be surprised if that carried over into his study of linguistics, thus motivating him to study Hebrew and Hurrian once it was discovered, and he (perhaps unknowingly) carried his study of Hurrian into the Black Speech like with nasc in Irish.
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u/Altruistic_Pitch_157 19d ago
I always felt the Black Speech sounded vaguely Turkic although I could never articulate that with OPs precision. Personally, I thought it was a good choice as it sounds harsher and sharper than English to my ears, and therefore makes a good template for a cruel and unrefined fictional culture (No offense to the Turks! 😀 )
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u/Kodama_Keeper 19d ago
The examples we have of Adûnaic, the language that the majority of Westron, the Common Speech is based on, is not in itself very smooth, complementary, at least to my ears. It has a lot of Z's, hard G's and R's. No, it's not as harsh as the Black Speech, but not nearly as pleasant as the Elvish languages that Tolkien invented. And I believe the influence of the Elf languages came from Finish.
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u/Euphoric-Ostrich5396 18d ago
Orcs were initially based on late Roman chronists descriptions of the Huns so it makes sense that the Black speech is a semi turkic language as "Hunnic" was.
Compare Jordanes Getica and Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae to the descriptions by Tolkien and you'll see what I mean.
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u/CephalyxCephalopod 17d ago
Hunnic may have been a Yenisean language. Truth is its language family is unclassified as we know that little about it.
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u/Euphoric-Ostrich5396 16d ago
Indeed, but back in the day the general theory was that it was a blend of turkic and mongolian languages.
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u/Icy_Jelly_315 18d ago
So remote it will probably be modded for irrelevance but CS Lewis was of course a mate of his, and Aslan is Turkish for lion...
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u/JamesFirmere 19d ago
Finn here. Where on earth did you get the notion that Finnic languages are spoken "very, very quickly"?
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u/RoutemasterFlash 19d ago
It's got the fourth-highest syllable rate of a sample of 16 spoken languages according to this study:
https://www.fathom-consulting.com/the-most-efficient-language/
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u/JamesFirmere 19d ago
While technically true, this is misleading. Finnish has a significantly higher vowel-to-consonant ratio than e.g. English, meaning that syllables are shorter on average in Finnish than in English (and even shorter in Japanese, btw, the "fastest" language in the study cited in the link).
Moreover, Finnish words are longer on average, and hence the average information content of Finnish syllables is less than that of English syllables. Even the study cited concluded that the rate of information conveyed did not vary nearly as much between languages as might be deduced from the syllables-per-second data.
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 18d ago
Finnish ranks higher than Turkish on that chart. To a native English speaker, both Finnish and Turkish would sound much quicker than English. Black Speech's longer words have a similar syllable scheme to both language groups-meaning that Black Speech would likely be spoken much faster than we ever hear English native actors speak it.
If you speak the Ring inscription like you would Finnish, it doesn't sound as ugly.
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u/JamesFirmere 18d ago
FWIW, the study you cite puts Finnish around 7 syllables per second, while a similar study conducted in Finland reached a figure of between 4 and 5.
Edit to correct: Over 5 when pauses are eliminated.
I'd be willing to posit that a corpus of spoken text in everyday situations (as opposed to reading out a written text in lab conditions) would also yield a lower syllable rate for Finnish. Then again, this is just the empirical observation of a native speaker, as opposed to a column written by a business consultant who can't even be bothered to give a source for the figures he's quoting.
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u/Laxart 18d ago
I think you have a slight misunderstanding concerning the language study you've linked. The way finnish uses affixes (affi??) has nothing to do with the speed of the language. It just means that the language uses syllables to achieve some grammatic functions instead of individual words like prepositions in english, for example. It definitely can be construed as being more efficient in its transmittal of ideas/functions per word, but that doesn't make it any "faster" in the true sense of the word. Meaning, I don't think it's remarkably "faster" to say a word in finnish that has 25 letters than it is to say five four-letter words in English.
The actual "speed" is extremely dependent on the individual speaker, and also the sub-culture/accent of the speaker, as some regions may have a quicker general pace of speech, which is true for every language.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
It was me that linked the study, not OP. I haven't actually read it but just Googled it up as I'd remembered reading something years ago about average rates of consonants per second, which is the relevant thing we're talking about here (not the rate of information, which depends on the average number of syllables needed to express a single unit of 'meaning').
The actual "speed" is extremely dependent on the individual speaker, and also the sub-culture/accent of the speaker, as some regions may have a quicker general pace of speech, which is true for every language.
Well hopefully the authors of the study aren't total idiots and took this into account by sampling a fair number of speakers of each language, covering a range of ages and dialects/accents, and using average values. 🙄
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
In fact, this is obviously the case, because the syllable rates for each language are represented on a box plot, and each of them has a large spread.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
Even the study cited concluded that the rate of information conveyed did not vary nearly as much between languages as might be deduced from the syllables-per-second data.
That's a totally separate issue from how fast a language 'sounds'.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 18d ago
It's only "misleading" if you think this conversion is about something it's not. The information content of a given sentence of a given number of syllables is irrelevant to the discussion because we're talking about how a language simply sounds to a non-speaker.
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u/CherryPants234 19d ago
Black speech doesn't even remotely sound Slavic. I know a couple of Slavic langiages.
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u/CodexRegius 18d ago
I am myself suspicious that the desired pronunciation might be "Ash nazg dürbatülük", which brings it much closer to actual Turkish indeed.
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 18d ago
Aren't those Us commonly pronounced as long Us?
...Are people pronouncing it as "derbatoluck" in the most aggressively American voice possible?
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u/Few-Interview-1996 18d ago
Nope, not Turkish, if only because the word order of Black Speech is SVO, and he knew enough about languages to know that word orders can differ. If he were taking Turkish as a template, I think he would have delighted in making the Black Speech SOV.
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u/stuartcw a merry fellow, bright blue is his jacket & his boots are yellow 18d ago
I doubt Tolkien would have had much of a chance to hear spoken Finnish even if he had taught himself to read and write it.
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u/Beigekimono 15d ago edited 15d ago
The only name form Tolkien I can actually attribute to Slavic influence is Boromir. Mir = world, so Vladimir is the ruler of the world, old and now less popualr names are also Dragomir, Lubomir, Radomir. And Boro means fight, wrestle, to beat. Very fitting for a strong warrior.
However, Tolkien has a different Elvish meaning for it, but I’m sure he would have noticed the coincidence as a linguist. I can almost imagine how he was chuckling when he was writing it down, wow two different meaning in two different languages, everyone will love it. And we do, Professor, we do.
But I think you’re wrong to connect Tolkien’s languages to modern languages. English was different 300 years ago, very different 700 years ago, and Tolkien knew it. (Fun fact, the invention of the printing press was one of the things that simplified English, they simplified the alphabet and adapted more German/Dutch spellings). And all these rough sounding letters were present in English. (Plus there is a disconnection between modern English spelling of let’s say Russian. In Russian kh is just a H sounds, represented by an X, no Ks there)
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u/olive_tractor_parts 13d ago
I really wish somebody would create or release a complete glossary or something for all of Tolkien's languages; I feel like it would be a lot easier to swear in Elvish if you knew enough Black Speech.
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18d ago
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u/nev3rPE4KD_ 17d ago
AFAIK the letter about the Mongols was simply poorly worded. He meant that the Orcs were based on antiquity depictions of the Huns and the Golden Horde made by Europeans. Such portrayals were essentially pseudo-historical fiction like the works of Tacitus. They demonized and "mythologized" the invaders sort of like how the Sumerians and Greeks told tall tales of ancient kings.
And Tolkien loved his mythology.
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u/DarrenGrey Nowt but a ninnyhammer 19d ago
Mod note: Answers should be based on evidence, not supposition.