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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, Circassi

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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
    >> Try an older Turkic text like Uyghur inscription: Aye, that sounds more Black Speech-y. What does it say, btw?
    - sedatk 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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

YeGoblynQueenne 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
  >> Try an older Turkic text like Uyghur inscription: Aye, that sounds more Black Speech-y. What does it say, btw?
  - sedatk 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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