Orcs and the black speech.

It was a race bred by the Dark Lord in the Early Days of Arda. As it is said in The Silmarillion “all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor were put in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy mockery of the Elves, of whom they afterwards were the bitterest foes… And deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery”.
The Sindarin name for this folk is orch, and in the Black Speech – the language of Mordor – it was related as uruk and for the lesser kinds it was snaga‘slave’. They had no language of their own, but developed a great many barbarious dialects, perverting other languages and adapting them for their needs. For communications between tribes the Orcs used the Westron tongue that sounded more like a harsh jargon. Still even this clumsy language was influenced by the nearness of the Mannish realms, thus the Orcish word tark ‘man of Gondor’ was a debased form of tarkil, a Quenya word for one of Númenorean descent.
Apart from Orcish jargons there existed one more language devised by Sauron for the everyday use within Mordor. “The Black Speech, entirely alien to any other tongues, is marked off by its use of grammatical suffixes ( gurbatulûk), its apparent postpositions (burzum-ishi), its constant back vowels, and consonant clusters (Lugbúrs, Nazgûl, Gorbag, Ufthak). To our ears also it sounds thick, guttural, clumsy. The croaked curses of the Orcs established them as a coarse, cruel, unimaginative folk. ” [13]
In the Third Age there were many words derived from the Black Speech, such as ghash ‘fire’ or sharku ‘old man’.
The inscription on the Ring of Power was in the ancient Black Speech, which was not forgotten only by the Nazgûl – the Ring-bearers – and the wizards: “Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul”.[2]
It can be rendered as the following: ” One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them.” In the second volume of the trilogy called The Two Towers we find a phrase in the Orcish tongue which Tolkien has left untranslated: “Ugluk u baronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob bubhosh skai”.

Next: The men of the west.