[Ltru] Re: Is 639-3 bogus ?

John Cowan wrote:

> Conlangs come from Language List.  If you go to
> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=orq you can
> see the link to the LL page.

Yes, I found that yesterday, that's where it says "No man's land"
and "Colloquial blackspeech".

> I think "orq" doesn't belong there: not a single word is extant.

<http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/257.html> says:

| The following is an excerpt from a Tolkien Linguistics site:

| Our sole example of pure Black Speech, then, is the inscription on the
| Ring: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh
| burzum-ishi krimpatul. "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
| One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them." (LotR1/II ch.
| 2) Nazg is "ring", also seen in Nazgûl "Ring-wraith(s)". Ash is the number
| "one", agh is the conjuction "and", disturbingly similar to Scandinavian
| og, och. Burzum is "darkness", evidently incorporating the same element
| búrz, burz- "dark" as in Lugbúrz "Tower-dark", the Black Speech name that
| Sindarin Barad-dûr translates. Hence, the -um of burzum must be an
| abstract suffix like the "-ness" of the corresponding English word
| "darkness". Burzum has a suffix ishi "in". In the transcription it is
| separated from burzum by a hyphen, but there is nothing corresponding in
| the Tengwar inscription on the Ring, so this may be considered either a
| postposition or a locative ending. (It is remarkably similar to Quenya
| -ssë and may support the theory advanced by Robert Foster in his Complete
| Guide to Middle-earth, that the Black Speech was to some extent based on
| Quenya and a perversion of it. The element burz- "dark" is also vaguely
| similar to the Elvish stem for "black", MOR.) Though burzum-ishi is
| translated "in the darkness", there does not seem to be anything
| corresponding to the article "the", unless it is somehow incorporated in
| ishi. But the evidence is that the Black Speech does not mark the
| distinction between definite and indefinite nouns; see below.

For more on that see <http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/orkish.htm>, I miss
"Yrch" on that page, otherwise it's apparently complete, about 30 words.

The IANA registry cannot list all made-up languages with about 30 words,
for some time any decent science fiction had a glossary with words in
some made-up language(s).  And 26*26*26 is far too limited to waste it
for such constructs in 639.

Frank

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