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Interjections
Interjection is a word or expression that expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction and occurs on its own and may break the flow of proper sentence. This group of words is diverse and ranges from words that may have meaning in proper sentence to absolutely meaningless accidental sounds (e.g. cough). Most common functions of interjections include:
- exclamations (like English “oops”, “wow”);
- curses and profanities (like “damn!”);
- greetings (e.g. “hi!”, “bye!”);
- responses (like “okay”, “hmm”, “huh?”)
- filler words (words that have meaning but being used to break the flow of speech absolutely unnecessary)
In sum, this lexical category includes words belonging only to it, as well as other parts of speech (verbs, adverbs, nouns) when used as interjections.
Interjections in Tolkien's Black Speech
The following unique interjections occur in The Lord of the Rings book throughout conversations of orcs:
| Interjection | Source | Meaning1) |
|---|---|---|
| garn | LOTR, TT, Book 4, Chapter X | LOS: “go on!”, “come on!” |
| nar | LOTR, TT, Book 4, Chapter X | AN: transformed into negative particle “no”, “not”, which was later used in Neo Black Speech (including Nûrlâm) both as stand-alone word and prefix/clitic |
| sha | Orcish curse | the meaning was changed into preposition “with” in later translations of Orcish curse by Tolkien |
| skai | Orcish curse | TK: “gah!” fans: “damn!”, “curse!”, “shit!” |
Please note that meanings of these words were extrapolated by fans, not by Tolkien himself, who left them untranslated.
Interjections in Neo Black Speech
The following interjections were added in various Neo Black Speech Dialects:
| Interjection | Dialect | Translation |
|---|---|---|
