Black Speech is generally¹⁾ considered an agglutinative language. This means that various suffixes or prefixes are added to the word to make new one, either to change the meaning or to express some grammatical or syntactical feature. In lesson about nouns we learnt, that suffix “-um” expresses the definite article similar to English “the”, and in previous lesson that many adjectives are formed from other words by adding suffix “-ûrz”. For example, “sigûrz” (long) from “sig-” (to stretch, lengthen). These suffices are used only for their particular purpose, and every grammatical category of the word adds its own suffix to the previous one, thus forming a “suffix chain”. This lesson will start to show such “chains” on the most basic examples.

A clitic is the word that is attached to other words to modify their meaning. It may be similar to a suffix, but have a meaning as a standalone word (and even may be written separetely), but still don't have much sense in the whole sentence without word it modifies.

Short, one-syllable long adjectives may act as clitics, in such case they are placed after the noun. For example, we'd like to say “fat troll”, “fat” is “tûrz” and “troll” is “olog” in Nûrlâm, but to make one word we should swap their order, so it will be “ologtûrz”. Word “za” (this) works similarly: “this human” may be spelled as “tarkza”. In case we want to add both adjective and word “this”, adjective comes the last: “this fat troll” is “ologzatûrz”. Such joints also mean the words are pronounced fast without pauses between them.

When adjective joins the noun, the definite article suffix “-um” comes after the adjective: “the fat troll” = “ologtûrzum”.

Joining two words may be cool and cryptic, but it may become too much cryptic, so my advices are to write them separately in the following situations:

• Noun + adjective joints are favorable in making new words, like names for people and places, e.g. “Lugbûrz” (Barad-dûr, Dark Tower) is literally “Tower-dark”, but for some abstract dark tower it's better to spell them separately: “some dark tower” is “mush bûrz lug” or “mush lug bûrz”.
• If one word ends with same (or similar) sound as the second starts, it's better to split them: “elf” is “golug”, “old” is “kû”, “old elf” would be “golugkû” but in hasty speech it will be most likely pronounced as /goluggu:/ or /golukku:/ which may lead to a confusion with “towards elf” and “know all” respectively, so it's better say just “kû golug”. However this rule doesn't apply to compound words and names like “Nazgûl” from “nazg” (ring) and “gûl” (wraith), “Mauhûr” from “mauh” (warrior) + “hûr” (fierce).
• Similarly, if one word ends with vowel and the other starts with vowel (even these vowels do not match): “this scary orc” is better be spelled as “za uf uruk” or “za urukuf” instead of “urukzauf”, as “au” will make different sound together (/aw/).
• On the contrary, while spelling the adjectives before nouns is encouraged, it's better to join them to the end of the word, if adjective ends with vowel and noun starts with vowel: “large orc” is better spelled as “urukdau” than “dau uruk”, to not be confused with “daurûk” (all cages) in speech. However “old orc” doesn't looks good either way “urukkû” or “kû uruk” (yet the latter is better, there is no word “kûr” in the dictionary).

All nouns we learnt in one of the previous lessons were ending with consonant, so adding definite article “-um” wasn't a problem. But what if there were some words ending with a vowel? Then, definite article is changed to just “-m”, e.g. “slave” is “snaga”, and “the slave” is “snagam”. Groups of words that are changed similarly during inflection are called “declension classes”. Nûrlâm has only two: words ending with consonants (declension class I) and words ending with vowels (declension class II). Declension class is very important, as not only the articles, but some other grammatical suffixes differ depending on declension class too.

There are very few words ending with vowel to learn (probably more than half of them are listed here):

• fau (snow)
• gai (chain)
• gau (fruit)
• ghru (stick)
• glu (piss)
• goi (city)
• hlu (clothes)
• hrau (flesh, meat)
• khlau (ear)
• lau (year)
• mau (warrior)²⁾
• noi (bee)
• poi (berry)
• sau (skill, ability, craft)
• shra (person, character)
• slai (life)
• snaga (slave, servant, thrall)
• sru (seed, grain)
• tau (forest)
• zrî (joy, fun)

You may notice, that most of them actually end with a diphthong, so technically a semi-vowel, but nonetheless they all belong to declension class II.

All adjectives also have two declension classes depending on if the word ends with a consonant or vowel.

Every addition of suffix or clitic should be done according to declension class of the previous part. For example the word “slave” (⇒ “snaga”) belongs to declension class II, adding adjective “dirty” (“dug”) to say “filthy snaga” changes the resulting word “snagadug” to class I. Thus “the slave” becomes “snagam”, but “the filthy slave” becomes “snagadugum”. On the contrary, “orc” (= “uruk”, declension class I) becomes “urukum” with article “the”, but adding adjective ending with vowel like “sta” (= “short”) converts it to declension class II: “urukstam”. Some suffixes are the same for both declension classes, like word “za” (this): “this slave” = “snagaza”, “this orc” = “urukza”.

• All lessons
• Lesson "Nouns, articles"
• Lesson "Adjectives"
• Clitics
• Declension classes