5 ms·

Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?

35 points by jmstfv 9y ago

adrianratnapala 9y ago
At a guess, I would say no, Turkish was not a model. At least if we limit ourselves to language. It is telling that the linked thread throws up three completely different near-eastern languages as candidates. Hittite a (distantly) Indo-European language, Turkish - a turkic language and Hurrian which is something completely different. Even if there is some "non-genetic" similarity among all these near eastern languages, then consider that all of Tolkien's non-elvish languages sound vaguely near-eastern to my untrained ear. This includes even the Common Speech, which sounds completely different from the English that it was translated into. But if we broaden our view from language to culture, then yes, I suspect that the Ottomans loomed large in the minds of Christian Europeans for so many centuries that they (or rather the western caricature of them) has influenced many evil empires of modern fantasy.
- makmanalp 9y ago
  As a Turk - The Yörüks are not necessarily obscure but not really very well known or oft-mentioned either like other ethnic groups like the Laz, Kurds, Circassians, Turkmens, etc. So it would be surprising to hear that many foreigners ever even heard of them at the time, let alone Tolkien. Then again, I guess I wouldn't put it past him to have encyclopedic knowledge of mythologies and histories. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C3%B6r%C3%BCks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C3%B6r%C3%BCks
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    I was going to say that, to my ears, the Black Speech of the inscription on the One Ring sounds a lot like Turkish, but I'm not a Turkish speaker [1]. So I looked for a few examples of (modern) Turkish and I have to say that- maybe not, after all? Compare: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. [2] With: Bütün insanlar hür, haysiyet ve haklar bakımından eşit doğarlar. Akıl ve vicdana sahiptirler ve birbirlerine karşı kardeşlik zihniyeti ile hareket etmelidirler. Not even close. But of course, there's all this stuff about all the southerners teaming up with Sauron and so on, so I always thought it was a fair assumption that there was a bit of north/south good/evil divide in old J.R.R's writings. __________ [1] Except of course for the many Turkish loan words in my language, Greek, which interestingly are very often food-related: baklava, kataifi, halva, pastourma (pastirma), peinirli, yaourti, soropi, karpouzi etc etc. [2] I even thought the "û" was supposed to sound like "ü".
    - sedatk 9y ago
      Try an older Turkic text like Uyghur inscription: nama but : nama darm : namo [sang] altun önglüg y(a)ruk yaltrık -lığ kopda kôtrülmiş nom iligi atl(ı)ğ nom bitigde kılınç adartmakın ôçürmek atl(ı)ğ bişinç bölük üçü[nç tegz]
      - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        >> Try an older Turkic text like Uyghur inscription: Aye, that sounds more Black Speech-y. What does it say, btw?
        sedatk 9y ago
        It's very different than modern Turkish I can only make out some words like "kılınç" (sword), "atlı" (horseman). Sounds like an ode to conquest.
        YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        Very apt then!
      - makmanalp 9y ago
        This is more like it! Still, that inscription seems to have vowel harmony, and the uruk-hai text doesn't ("gimbatul", "krimpatul"). Oh well, it's fantasy after all. Also, re: food: "dolmades"! :-) The interesting thing about words like "karpouzi" is that again, the o and i don't harmonize because the former is a low vowel, and the latter is a high vowel, and that's a pretty strong clue that it's been changed, because there are very few if any words in Turkish that don't follow vowel harmony. We say "karpuz". Then again, who knows who had it first and who changed it after! :P
        YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        Aw, dolmades, how did I leave that out :D I didn't know about vowel harmony, but it seems we have many, many words from Turkish in Greek that are just the Turkish word with an "-i" stuck at the end: pasoumi, ati, ginati, gieri ("gut", from cigeri), kapaki, kaloupi etc etc. I guess that just brings the sound of the word more in line with what we're used to in the rest of the Greek language. In Greek we don't have the long-"u" that Turkish has (incidentally, that long "u" sounds very similar to the French "u" to me, French being my second language) so we basically change it to the shorter, rounder "ou", hence "karpouzi" instead of "karpuz". Sometimes we just shorten and round-out an "o" sound also: we say "boudroumi", for "dungeon", coming from "bodrum" I reckon (the old joke is that "Boudroumia & Baboules" is the Greek version of "Dungeons & Dragons"; I don't know if "baboulas" comes from Turkish- it means "bogeyman"). It's funny because not speaking Turkish I have no idea what some of those words really mean, or how they 're pronounced in Turkish, or even sometimes if they're actually Turkish at all. I know that, to my ears they sound not quite Greek, and I can't really figure out their meaning, so they're probably loan words and therefore most likely Turkish (although there have to be plenty that come from Albanian). I quite like that btw, hope you don't want them all back now :P
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > Hittite a (distantly) Indo-European language "Distantly"?
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    It is very old and branched off from the rest earlier than all the other recognized ones. Some say it is not even Indo-European. But that is a distinction without a difference, all sides seem to agree that Indo-European, including, Hittite, and Indo-European without it are both good "clades". So there is no disagreement about past linguistic events; the only disagreement is the judgement call about what to name things.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      Being very old makes it closer to Proto-Indo-European than any other known language. Proto-Indo-European is, obviously, older than Hittite.
      - adrianratnapala 9y ago
        True, age makes it closer to the common ancestor. Although as I said, it's a matter of taste whether to call that ancester PIE, or to reserve that name for some more recent language. But if it branched off earlier, and developed on its own for longer, then we expect it to have diverged more than other languages that existed around the tail end of its existence. So I think what linguists are saying is that ancient Greek, Persian, Sanskrit etc. are all more similar to each other than any of them is to Hittite. And the same goes for the reconstructions we can do for other Indo-European sub-families.
      - adrianratnapala 9y ago
        True, age makes it closer to the common ancestor. Although as I said, it's a matter of taste whether to call that ancester PIE, or to reserve that name for some more recent language. But if it branched off earlier, and developed on its own for longer, then we expect it to have diverged more than other languages that existed around the tail end of its existence. So I think what linguists are saying is that ancient Greek, Persian, Sanskrit etc. are all more similar to each other than any of them is to Hittite. And the same goes for the reconstructions we can do for other Indo-European sub-families.
unclepresent 9y ago
Uruk is a derogatory word in Russian language commonly used to discribe immigrants from Muslim countries.
nine_k 9y ago
From the precious little I know about Mongolian language, I'd say that Black Speech shares a number of phonetic similarities with it. You can read and listen to samples of speech about 3/4 down this page: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm (Search for "Khün bür törzh mendlekhee erkh čölöötei")
aptwebapps 9y ago
The fourth comment in that thread has an extensive quote from JRRT which lays the whole thing to rest but don't let that stop you ...
pvg 9y ago
Seems like a pretty straightforward 'no', given what Tolkien said about it himself: Quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Speech "The Black Speech was not intentionally modeled 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 an agglutinative language." Turkish is agglutinative but so are zillions of other unrelated languages. Zillions of languages might have a 'uruk'-like word in them.

35 points by jmstfv 9y ago

At a guess, I would say no, Turkish was not a model. At least if we limit ourselves to language. It is telling that the linked thread throws up three completely different near-eastern languages as candidates. Hittite a (distantly) Indo-European language, Turkish - a turkic language and Hurrian which is something completely different. Even if there is some "non-genetic" similarity among all these near eastern languages, then consider that all of Tolkien's non-elvish languages sound vaguely near-eastern to my untrained ear. This includes even the Common Speech, which sounds completely different from the English that it was translated into. But if we broaden our view from language to culture, then yes, I suspect that the Ottomans loomed large in the minds of Christian Europeans for so many centuries that they (or rather the western caricature of them) has influenced many evil empires of modern fantasy.

makmanalp 9y ago
As a Turk - The Yörüks are not necessarily obscure but not really very well known or oft-mentioned either like other ethnic groups like the Laz, Kurds, Circassians, Turkmens, etc. So it would be surprising to hear that many foreigners ever even heard of them at the time, let alone Tolkien. Then again, I guess I wouldn't put it past him to have encyclopedic knowledge of mythologies and histories. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C3%B6r%C3%BCks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C3%B6r%C3%BCks
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  I was going to say that, to my ears, the Black Speech of the inscription on the One Ring sounds a lot like Turkish, but I'm not a Turkish speaker [1]. So I looked for a few examples of (modern) Turkish and I have to say that- maybe not, after all? Compare: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. [2] With: Bütün insanlar hür, haysiyet ve haklar bakımından eşit doğarlar. Akıl ve vicdana sahiptirler ve birbirlerine karşı kardeşlik zihniyeti ile hareket etmelidirler. Not even close. But of course, there's all this stuff about all the southerners teaming up with Sauron and so on, so I always thought it was a fair assumption that there was a bit of north/south good/evil divide in old J.R.R's writings. __________ [1] Except of course for the many Turkish loan words in my language, Greek, which interestingly are very often food-related: baklava, kataifi, halva, pastourma (pastirma), peinirli, yaourti, soropi, karpouzi etc etc. [2] I even thought the "û" was supposed to sound like "ü".
  - sedatk 9y ago
    Try an older Turkic text like Uyghur inscription: nama but : nama darm : namo [sang] altun önglüg y(a)ruk yaltrık -lığ kopda kôtrülmiş nom iligi atl(ı)ğ nom bitigde kılınç adartmakın ôçürmek atl(ı)ğ bişinç bölük üçü[nç tegz]
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      >> Try an older Turkic text like Uyghur inscription: Aye, that sounds more Black Speech-y. What does it say, btw?
      - sedatk 9y ago
        It's very different than modern Turkish I can only make out some words like "kılınç" (sword), "atlı" (horseman). Sounds like an ode to conquest.
        YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        Very apt then!
    - makmanalp 9y ago
      This is more like it! Still, that inscription seems to have vowel harmony, and the uruk-hai text doesn't ("gimbatul", "krimpatul"). Oh well, it's fantasy after all. Also, re: food: "dolmades"! :-) The interesting thing about words like "karpouzi" is that again, the o and i don't harmonize because the former is a low vowel, and the latter is a high vowel, and that's a pretty strong clue that it's been changed, because there are very few if any words in Turkish that don't follow vowel harmony. We say "karpuz". Then again, who knows who had it first and who changed it after! :P
      - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        Aw, dolmades, how did I leave that out :D I didn't know about vowel harmony, but it seems we have many, many words from Turkish in Greek that are just the Turkish word with an "-i" stuck at the end: pasoumi, ati, ginati, gieri ("gut", from cigeri), kapaki, kaloupi etc etc. I guess that just brings the sound of the word more in line with what we're used to in the rest of the Greek language. In Greek we don't have the long-"u" that Turkish has (incidentally, that long "u" sounds very similar to the French "u" to me, French being my second language) so we basically change it to the shorter, rounder "ou", hence "karpouzi" instead of "karpuz". Sometimes we just shorten and round-out an "o" sound also: we say "boudroumi", for "dungeon", coming from "bodrum" I reckon (the old joke is that "Boudroumia & Baboules" is the Greek version of "Dungeons & Dragons"; I don't know if "baboulas" comes from Turkish- it means "bogeyman"). It's funny because not speaking Turkish I have no idea what some of those words really mean, or how they 're pronounced in Turkish, or even sometimes if they're actually Turkish at all. I know that, to my ears they sound not quite Greek, and I can't really figure out their meaning, so they're probably loan words and therefore most likely Turkish (although there have to be plenty that come from Albanian). I quite like that btw, hope you don't want them all back now :P
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> Hittite a (distantly) Indo-European language "Distantly"?
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  It is very old and branched off from the rest earlier than all the other recognized ones. Some say it is not even Indo-European. But that is a distinction without a difference, all sides seem to agree that Indo-European, including, Hittite, and Indo-European without it are both good "clades". So there is no disagreement about past linguistic events; the only disagreement is the judgement call about what to name things.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    Being very old makes it closer to Proto-Indo-European than any other known language. Proto-Indo-European is, obviously, older than Hittite.
    - adrianratnapala 9y ago
      True, age makes it closer to the common ancestor. Although as I said, it's a matter of taste whether to call that ancester PIE, or to reserve that name for some more recent language. But if it branched off earlier, and developed on its own for longer, then we expect it to have diverged more than other languages that existed around the tail end of its existence. So I think what linguists are saying is that ancient Greek, Persian, Sanskrit etc. are all more similar to each other than any of them is to Hittite. And the same goes for the reconstructions we can do for other Indo-European sub-families.
    - adrianratnapala 9y ago
      True, age makes it closer to the common ancestor. Although as I said, it's a matter of taste whether to call that ancester PIE, or to reserve that name for some more recent language. But if it branched off earlier, and developed on its own for longer, then we expect it to have diverged more than other languages that existed around the tail end of its existence. So I think what linguists are saying is that ancient Greek, Persian, Sanskrit etc. are all more similar to each other than any of them is to Hittite. And the same goes for the reconstructions we can do for other Indo-European sub-families.

unclepresent 9y ago

Uruk is a derogatory word in Russian language commonly used to discribe immigrants from Muslim countries.

nine_k 9y ago

From the precious little I know about Mongolian language, I'd say that Black Speech shares a number of phonetic similarities with it. You can read and listen to samples of speech about 3/4 down this page: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm (Search for "Khün bür törzh mendlekhee erkh čölöötei")

aptwebapps 9y ago

The fourth comment in that thread has an extensive quote from JRRT which lays the whole thing to rest but don't let that stop you ...

pvg 9y ago

Seems like a pretty straightforward 'no', given what Tolkien said about it himself: Quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Speech "The Black Speech was not intentionally modeled 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 an agglutinative language." Turkish is agglutinative but so are zillions of other unrelated languages. Zillions of languages might have a 'uruk'-like word in them.