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Of Hobbits
The Hobbits of the Shire and of Bree had at this time, for probably a thousand years, adopted the Common Speech. They used it in their own ma
Of Other Races
Ents. The most ancient people surviving in the Third Age were theOnodrim orEnyd .Ent was the form of their name in the language of Rohan. They were known to the Eldar in ancient days, and to the Eldar indeed the Ents ascribed not their own language but the desire for speech. The language that they had made was unlike all others: slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed longwinded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the loremasters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing. They used it only among themselves; but they had no need to keep it secret, for no others could learn it. Ents were, however, themselves skilled in tongues, learning them swiftly and never forgetting them. But they preferred the languages of the Eldar, and loved best the ancient High-elven tongue. The strange words and names that the Hobbits record as used by Treebeard and other Ents are thus Elvish, or fragments of Elf-speech strung together in Ent-fashion. Some are Quenya: asTaurelilomea-tumbalemorna Tumbaletaerea Lomeanor , which may be rendered 'Forestmanyshadowed-deepvalleyblack Deepvalleyforested Gloomyland', and by which Treebeard meant, more or less: 'there is a black shadow in the deep dales of the forest'. Some are Sindarin: asFangorn 'beard-(of)-tree', orFimbrethil 'slender-beech'.
Orcs and the Black Speech. Orc is the form of the name that other races had for this foul people as it was in the language of Rohan. In Sindarin it wasorch . Related, no doubt, was the worduruk of the Black Speech, though this was applied as a rule only to the great soldier-orcs that at this time issued from Mordor and Isengard. The lesser kinds were called, especially by the Uruk-hai,snaga 'slave'. The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in the Elder Days. It is said that they bad no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse. And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different tribes. So it was that in the Third Age Orcs used for communication between breed and breed the Westron tongue; and many indeed of the older tribes, such as those that still lingered in the North and in the Misty Mountains, had long used the Westron as their native language, though in such a fashion as to make it hardly less unlovely than Orkish. In this jargontark , 'man of Gondor', was a debased form oftarkil , a Quenya word used in Westron for one of Numenorean descent; see III, 54. It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he bad desired to make it the language of all those that served him, but he failed in that purpose. From the Black Speech, however, were derived many of the words that were in the Third Age wide-spread among the Orcs, such asghash 'fire', but after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgul. When Sauron arose again, it became once more the language of Barad-dur and of the captains of Mordor. The inscription on the Ring was in the ancient Black Speech, while the curse of the Mordor-orc in II, 53. was in the more debased form used by the soldiers of the Dark Tower, of whom Grishnakh was the captain. Sharku in that tongue meansold man .
Trolls.Troll has been used to translate the SindarinTorog . In their begi
Dwarves. The Dwarves are a race apart. Of their strange begi