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Black Speech School site was updated.
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Looking for old page "Dictionaries"?
It was moved to Shadowlandian section.
Dictionaries
The site now hosts three distinct dialects: older two are Shadowlandian
and Horngoth,
and the new one was created specially for
Nûrlâm dictionary
Orcish–English–Russian dictionary
More than 6800 words.
It is the most full and correct vocabulary of other Neo Black Speech dialects (about 9 + subdialects).
- Online
- PDF (945 Kbytes)
- zipped MS Excel
(454 Kbytes)
(Last updated on
8 Sep 2022)
Comments

How many words is the Svartiska wordlist that you've incorporated? I have one of 2300 words
2350 roughly, but this includes different spellings of same word, cognate words and some Shadowlandian words marked as SV (however I haven't found some of them in my pure Svartiska sources).
The whole dictionary here is based on Red Hand wordlist by Lugrekh, but it is being slowly corrected and appended since opening of this site. All sources are listed in "Links" section, but most of them are gone now
Ok it is probably generally the same list then. You've mentioned somewhere that some of the words sound a bit silly slavic languages and have noticed that there are some words that are taken directly from russian like 'iz' (from) and of course the plural suffix -i. There are some words that are taken directly from scandinavian as well e.g. 'auga' (eye).
And some Turkish-like too, i.e. Kazan, Jatagan
plural suffix -i can also be from Latin
yes, and there is also a plural marker -i in Quenya
Should I add information about real language sources into dictionary?
I just noticed that a very common svartiska word is not glossed right in the dictionary. The word "pot" means "here" (Swedish "här") but when you put a verbal ending on it means "to come" - the rational is that when you act to come _here_. The imperative is "pot" which also means just "here". The dictionary seems to only have the verb meaning.
Is it written just "pot" or with long vowel ("pôt") as in my dictionary?
Can it be used in expressions like "it is here"?
I'm looking through Utumno's Black Speech brochure, and it contains a lot of words absent in my dictionaries. Should I consider them Svartiska or Zhaaburi A?
It's written "pot" and yes it can be used that way - "za ti pot" (it is here).
Actually I'm translating the zhâburi A-list right now. My idea was to label it as Svartiska but maybe it's just easier to just list them as Zhâburi A. But that's up to you. I have some more words for Zhâburi A which are not on that list.
The Svartiska words are coined by Swedes and j is pronounced as y in English "yes". In my experience this is very difficult for English native speakers to understand. I suggest to change every Svartiska j to y in the dictionary or publish a table with sound descriptions for the different dialects. I can provide you with a sound table.
Maybe I will add a note to Lesson II - Sounds and Pronunciation. For me it was obvious
However I was in doubt about ch (should it be pronounced as in English or German). I found an answer at your pages
I saw that the word for market is quite similar to the Swedish word for square "torg" which of course is the place you have the market
trog - n market LOS, SV, MERP, HORN
in Slavic languages "torg" is what happens at the market (translated as "trade")
Yes of course I knew that
Interesting - scandinavian got 'torg' from old slavic
From Old Norse torg, from Old East Slavic търгъ (tŭrgŭ, “trade, trading, commerce; (trade) square”),[1] from Proto-Slavic *tъrgъ. Cognate with Danish torv and Swedish torg (“a city square”).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/torg#Etymology
Hey there, good to see Black Speech is alive and well! I'm the scribe who put together the notes on Horngoth, waaaay back in 2003 or so.
Scatha and I corresponded and collaborated regularly during that timeframe; that's why there's a bit of overlap. I think she ended up with a larger vocabulary, spending effort getting to a 'critical mass' of usable words. However, the nice thing about Black Speech is that the vocabularies are pretty inter-useful across dialects.
Off and on, I've wanted to clean up my grammar notes, but I don't know if there's any interest. Any thoughts?
Hello!
Unfortunately there're not much feedback here and messages about Black Speech at various social networks are very scarce. But at least me and author of Zhaburi dialect may be interested.
I saw some Perfect and Passive suffixes for verbs in Horngoth dictionary but without any example it's not absolutely clear how to use them. The other interesting Horngoth feature are some postpositions used the same as Latin prefixes. This part of language also requires clarification (they are not even visible at Horngoth pages, only in raw datafile).
Currently I'm working on a new dialect which will be called "Nûrlâm" (lit. scholar language). I can give the link to it's current state via e-mail and interesting in some critique.
Hi! Interesting to hear from the Horngoth scribe. I'm actually trying to make sense of that dialect and publish my own summary on my site.
https://zhaaburi.wordpress.com