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The Language
of the Dwarves
Khuzdul
Khuzdul is the language
Tolkien devised for the dwarves… and Khuzdul is the language Mahal taught
them before they were put to sleep under the mountains. It is important to
know something about the attitude the dwarves have towards their language.
Tolkien describes the dwarves as ‘secretive, acquisitive, laborous,
retentive of the memory of injuries[…]It is according to the nature of the
Dwarves that in travelling, and labouring, and trading about the world they
should use ever openly the languages of the Men among whom they dwell; and yet
in secret (a secret which unlike the Elves they are unwilling to unlock even
to those whom they know are friends and desire learning not power) they use a
strange slow-changing tongue. (HoME 12 p.22) Tolkien also wrote:
The father-tongue of the
Dwarves Aule himself devised for them, and their languages have thus no
kinship with those of the Quendi. The dwarves do not gladly teach their tongue
to those of alien race; and in use they have made it harsh and intricate.’ (HoME
p.295)
Khuzdul is a secret
language,
a ritual language which dwarves use mostly for recording, ceremonies and
namegiving. The dwarves’ khuzdul names are never divulged, and never written
down. The secrecy goes so far that they have adopted a whole set of Mannish
names to identify themselves outside of their own language.
The corpus of attested words
in Khuzdul is very small… maybe a set of at most fifty words…and the bulk
of them consists of place names. There is exactly one exclamation which could
be seen as a phrase… Gimli’s war cry ‘baruk Khazâd ai-mênu’. However,
luckily Tolkien usually gave a translation of the names so that it is possible
to guess at the meaning of the individual elements in the words.
Although Tolkien had a set of
grammatical rules in mind when creating his few expressions and words, it is
hard to decide what they might have been. The scarcity of the corpus means
that without an explicit statement on Tolkien’s side interpretations are
wide open. It also means that when talking about Khuzdul we cannot actually
talk about a ‘language’, only about some fragments of it, fragments which
are barely enough to give us an idea what the actual language might be like.
Khuzdul A
This is where Khuzdul A comes
in. It is important to underline that Khuzdul A is by no means Tolkien’s
Khuzdul, but it is based, wherever possible, on what we can know, or extract,
or conjecture from the existing corpus. It is also important to see that some
of the conclusions done on the existing corpus might later be disproven by
more linguistic evidence which is, at the moment, not available.
However, there are a few
things we do know about the way Tolkien went about to create Khuzdul words,
one of them is that he used the idea of radical roots. This is an important
concept which is the base of all word formation in Khuzdul A. But what does it
mean?
Radical roots are a set of
consonants which determine the basic sense of the word. Its grammatical
function of verb, adjective, noun is then determined by the addition of vowels,
prefixes and suffixes. Once this principle is understood it is relatively
simple to determine whether a word within a context is a verb, a noun, or an
adjective as each word class displays a different set of vowels. This also
means that words are less likely to undergo consonant changes like
assimilation, because the consonants are important carriers of meaning.
Changing the consonant means changing the meaning. This is one reason why
Khuzdul is also a fairly unchanged language, aside from the dwarvish tendency
to be conservative about changes.
The radical root system of
word formation is taken from the Semitic language systems; Arabic, and Hebrew.
This is one reason why we opted to orient ourselves widely on the Arabic
grammar while deciding about grammatical features. This makes the language
quite distinct from the more indo-european system of the Sindarin and Quenya.
We have also aimed at trying to retain that harsh sounding character which
Tolkien describes as being typical for Khuzdul. It is also something which all
of you should bear in mind when going about creating new words. However,
actual rules for word formation will be the subject for the next lecture. In
this lecture I just want to take a look at the phonemic system of Khuzdul
What is a
phoneme?… it is a
sound element…. Basically a vowel or consonant. Every language has its own
set of typical sounds which make the character of the language. There are
rules about which phonemes can go side by side, rules which also change from
one language to the other. In Khuzdul we have an indication about the phonemic
set through the Cirth Tolkien provided in the appendices of LotR. These runes
basically stand for a sound, or a phoneme. We have to assume that Khuzdul
would write exactly what it hears, meaning that it is a phonetic script where
silent symbols have no place. English used to have a phonetic spelling too,
but as we all know, pronunciation and spelling have little in common today. In
fact the English spelling provides a good view into the past of the language…
as a German speaker I can read English as if it were German… and I get a
good idea about the way it sounded five hundred years ago. Khuzdul still would
have phonetic spelling.. meaning all symbols have a sound value… no
unnecessary runes which are not pronounced.
However, in the alphabet we
are using it
is not possible to reproduce these sounds adequately and Tolkien often opted
for a combination of letters to describe one sound. This is important to know
because Khuzdul as a rule does not allow double consonants at the beginning,
and consonant clusters of more than two at all… That is a fixed rule… and
to be able to read Khuzdul in latin letters we need to know what letter
combinations describe what sound. In the runes every sound is described as
only one rune, which means that reading the Angerthas Moria is less ambiguous
than reading the latin transcript. Below I have drawn up the Cirth as they
apply to the Khuzdul, disregarding the Elvish variations. Next to them are the
symbols which would be used in the IPA (international phonetic alphabet
[international that is except for the USA]) The red variants describe the
Erebor variants which show a slightly different use of the runes. I have opted
for the Angerthas set which means that there are no words containing an
‘x’
Red:
Transcribed
value (what you will read in a latin text and how you will have to transcribe
the rune)
Green: International phonetic alphabet
(IPA symbol)
Blue/ yellow:
Angerthas Erebor variant (non
standard)
The runes are mostly arranged
in pairs of unvoiced, voiced. If they are reversed they are fricatives,
meaning, they produce a hissing sound as air is let to pass.
Some notes on the phonetic symbols:
The little raised ‘h’
means that the consonant is followed by a puff of air, giving it a greater
strength. Tolkien himself only mentions th, kh, leaving it to us to conclude
whether dh and gh would be aspirated voiced stops or fricatives. One could
argue with parallelism…. But phonetic systems are not always parallel or
logical. However, the character of the language leads me to believe that the
voiced pairs should also be aspirated stops and not fricatives.
The little ‘w’ after the
consonant means that there is a lip rounding following the consonant which
changes its quality.
The vowels have given me some
headache because Tolkien states that no language except Sindarin knows umlauts
which in German are written as ü,ö. This means that these two letters cannot
actually denote an umlaut… they must have another value. As the text in the
appendices uses for a long vowel the macron, that is the long slash over the
letter the two points might indicate an overlong vowel. In the phonetic
symbols this means u: denotes a long vowel, ŭ denotes an over length. At
what point these overlong vowels can appear, however, is unclear.
The question mark with the ‘
should actually be overturned and denotes a glottal stop… the sound the
cockney make when pronouncing butter…. bu’er. It is considered a full
consonant which, however, is usually placed initially.
The upside down ‘e’ is
called schwa and is an empty vowel… the vowel one produces when tongue and
lips are in absolute repose. It is usually put between two consonants which
would otherwise be fairly difficult to pronounce as for example the
combination khw-g. As a proper vowel in between could changed the meaning of
the word the schwa is used to make pronunciation possible. For writing
purposes we use an ° here… for empty.
Some other pronunciations: ch is pronounced as in chain, j is
pronounced as in jean, gh is pronounced as in the middle English
knight… a soft hissing sound, slightly voiced, not as rough as the
Scottish loch (this would be its partner sound but Tolkien expressly
notes that this sound does not exist in Khuzdul) s and z are the
unvoiced and voiced pair of the same articulation while sh is
pronounced as in she, zh is a voiced sh, pronounced as in
the French garage. Y is the sound one finds in young,
while ŋ is the final ng of young. Ng however
is as in singer… a very faint g is audible there.
For the vowels Tolkien gives
the examples of machine, were, father,
for, brute. All vowels are absolutely not diphthongised. Khuzdul would
possess no diphthongs proper but diphthongisation can happen with w and
y after a and i respectively, so khawlad would become
khaulad. It is, however, important to realize that the u still retains its
consonantal quality of radical root…. In another environment the u will
become w again.
To
be continued
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