Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
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Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
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Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#2At 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.
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#3Uruk is a derogatory word in Russian language commonly used to discribe immigrants from Muslim countries.
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#4At 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 language…
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.
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#5At 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 language…
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.wiki…
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".
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#6At 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 language…
> Hittite a (distantly) Indo-European language
"Distantly"?
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#7From 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 (Search for "Khün bür törzh mendlekhee erkh čölöötei")
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#8The 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 ...
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#9Seems like a pretty straightforward 'no', given what Tolkien said about it himself:
Quoted in 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.
Re: Uruk – Turkish as a Model for the Black Speech?
#10At 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 language…
> Hittite a (distantly) Indo-European language "Distantly"?
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.