Development of Angband Orcish ‘our’
by Björn Axén
I never liked the possessive pronoun ‘dimba’ (our) that I coined for Angband Orcish (AO). In the post were I coined it I wrote: “The first person stem in PE [primitive elvish] is ni and which gives us AO di to which the pluralmarker –m is attached: dim. To this the possessive ending –ba, from PE –wā, is added: dimba.”
The problem is the –mb– cluster, it just sounds to much like Elvish for Orcish speech so I think I will add a phonetic rule that medially -mb- change to -ghb-. So ‘our’ is now instead dighba. Yes I know the combination is found in the ring verse (gimbatul and the similar krimpatul)
The line “a star shines on the hour of our meeting” is then instead
Zhán shila zhúm-da banar-ghu dighba or Zhán shila zhúm-shi banar-ghu dighba.
We can make this rule more general så all the similar clusters have similar changes. I will use the dummy words *dinda and *dinga which at least for now does not mean anything in Angband Orcish.
dinda: -nd- > -zd- > dizda
dinga: -Vng- > -VVg- > díga
It would be interesting to hear what you think of this.
In the Shadow of Elvish - The Black Speech and Orcish 
Making rules for phonetical correspondences is the really serious approach, I’ve seen only at https://elhath.tripod.com/powl.htm before. I was too lazy for that, and one of Nûrlâm dialect’s goals is to try to avoid false cognates with other dialects, which is hard to achieve with strict phonetical transformations from Elvish languages.
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The phonologial development is very much in the style of Tolkien. And it suites my creative mind. But there is of course drawbacks. I have been thinking of computer generate base words instead. But I find the idea boring. But I am thinking that maybe some kind of combination would be interesting. Imagine that Morgoth gives the orcs a base language which mergers with their own languages which is a twisted and ugly variant of Primitive Elvish just like the Orcs are twisted variants of Elves.
I have a vision of sketching broad second age orcish dialects developing from Angband Orcish which merges in a panorcish language under Sauron’s rule and the Black Speech. This panorcish dialect will then be the base for the Orcish dialects which develop during the third age. Maybe with substrate dialects from the second age.
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Using some word-generator is OK for new conlang, but assigning the meaning with connection to other Tolkien’s languages kinda neglects the benefits of fully automatic generation.
Making the script that would automatically apply rules for evolutionary phonetical transformations on Elvish word-list doesn’t seem like a very hard task for me (except creating these rules). The problem is, Elvish languages are quite limited too.
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No it’s of course quite simple even if I have to research how to do it =D
But I find very boring an uninspiring.
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Interesting, I’m creating a language that’s not Black Speech but aesthetically inspired by it, and I’ve also decided to remove a lot of nasals. On the other hand, I find that they sound the least unfitting to me if they appear before other consonants.
If I understand correctly, the basic form of the pronoun remains “dim”, without changing to “digh”?
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Yes that is my idea.
Interesting with your language. What it’s culture setting? Background and so on?
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Kinda hard to answer that one 😀
It’s been a work in progress for a while, because I keep having new ideas that clash with previous ones, so I have to constantly scrap parts of the whole con-world and remake them, and… well, basically my point is that this con-culture is currently somewhat of a mess and subject to change. Anyway, the language is spoken by certain pastoralists living on cool/temperate plains and hilly regions, and this is where it probably originates. Today its divergent but still mutually intelligible version is used in the main cultural centres to the east and north, and there’s also a group living much further to the north, isolated from the rest but engaged in intensive trade with the heartlands and as such culturally and linguistically homogeneous with them.
They are quite belligerent (though this is not an uncommon characteristic among their neighbours either) and have significantly expanded their territory in the recent past. This is in no small part thanks to technological advances, though these actually helped largely by improving the efficiency of food production – thus facilitating the settling of previously barely-inhabitable areas – rather than by providing a military advantage.
Their culture is quite egalitarian. The differences between the quality of life of the social classes are small, the main distinction lies in the power held rather than money, due to it relying mostly on social connections regulated by strict honour code. Women are expected to have a certain degree of education and military training, and are on legally more-or-less equal position to men. Of course everything comes at a price: this is largely possible because virtually all manual labour is performed by slaves taken from neighbouring territories (though admittedly they’re treated well, if chiefly because of pragmatic considerations).
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Thanks! Have you developed more than this culture?
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Is there any chance of you sending me an updated word list and teach me how to coin new words as I wish to do a lot of poetry in this language.
Many thanks,
Jedi
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Do you mean Zhâburi or Angband Orcish? Either way I have no newer word lists than the published ones.
I coin words when I need them. I don’t have any material ready on how to coin new words that I can share. My notes on it are really messy. Otherwise I would have published it.
You can send me a list of words you want I can see if can coin some new words.
Either way – I would love to see some poetry.
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