Russian historian Alexandre Nemirovsky proposed a hypothesis that Classical Black Speech was based on extinct Hurrian language. This idea is controversial but it became popular among Black Speech researchers. Nemirovsky's analysis of Ring Inscription was made prior to publication of Parma Eldalamberon issue 17 (in 2002 or earlier, while PE 17 was out in 2007) and based on Russian translation.
Nemirovsky provides following arguments (taken from his personal site, since 2007, translated and commented by Un4givenOrc):
Mordor's bilingual inscription allows us to find meaning of all words and morphemes used there, and define Black Speech as ergative (not because of this, see the remark for point 3) agglutinative language which is probably started to shift into active (Nominative-Accusative) alignment. Comparison with some personal names allows us to define few more roots and morphemes: Uglûk probably means ”(do something)-completely/all“, whence “ugl-” is active verb; comparison of “Lugburz” (Dark Tower) with “burzum” (darkness) allows us to define meaning of ”-um“ as formant of abstract substation, and also word order of descriptive construction (modified noun “lug” = “tower” before modifier “burz” = “dark”). We can't find any specific gender endings, therefore Black Speech highly probable do not have grammatical gender. Nominal and verbal roots looks similar and are constructed by the same scheme CVC(C). Of course all this cannot be called a substantial result.
However accidental comparison of Black Speech and Hurrian language of real-world Hurro-Urartian subgroup of Nakh-Daghestanian branch of East Caucasian sub-family gave surprising results (even criticized Altaicists now consider Hurro-Urartian as distinct language family, Nakh-Daghestanian is usually called Northeast-Caucasian language family). There were discovered not only structural but also material similarities between Black Speech and Hurrian language (spoken in 3rd – 1st millennium BC by ancestors of modern Armenians and Kurds, who changed the language to Indo-European): (very controversial claim, as there were also Indo-European Hittites and language-isolate Hatti in nearby territories around the same time, the connection to later is also controversial though)
Black Speech | Translation | Hurrian |
---|---|---|
ash | one | Urartian “she” other sources states that “še” was Urartian ergative case suffix |
durb- | to rule, manage, control, judge | “turb-”, “turobe” (predestined evil; judgement; enemy) comparison made with one of inaccurate translations into Russian – Tolkien's are: to rule, constrain, force, dominate |
at | (formant of some mood, probably desiderative in future tense) | -ed in other sources transcribed also as “ēt” – the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants was rare in writing |
ul | they, them | -l(la) |
uk | fully, completely (formant of final action) | -ok-, verbal formant of affirmative/enforcing meaning “certainly”, “definitely”, “fully”, “truly” |
gimb- | find, catch | ki(b), “take, put, gather” |
thrak- | bring, get, achieve, obtain | thar-(ik-), “to demand” |
agh | and | Urartian postposition “aye” (at, [near]by) |
burz- | dark | “wur” (to see) + “z” (“at the limit”) also “fur” in other sources From Ardalambion: the root is present in “wurikk-” = “to be blind” and really would express something opposite to “see, seeable” with any negative particle |
krimp- | tie | “ker-imbu-” (to stretch, lengthen) |
There is another resemblance not found by Nemirovsky: compare Orcish “tark” (men of Numenorian descend) with Hurrian “turuhhi”, “turohhe” (male, adj.), “taršuwani” (person)
Below are summarized remarks about Nemirovsky's hypothesis by Nûrlâm's author: