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Auxlangs and Orcs' Langs

From:Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 16, 2004, 14:22
I wonder if Tolkien was having a dig at Esperanto in his description of the
Black Speech. It was, after all, an artificial language created by Sauron
to unify his disparate followers. While Esperanto claims to be a highly
euphonious language, beauty is in the ear of the beholder, and if a
(mainly) Romance vocabulary adapted to a Slavic phonology offended JRRT's
ears, having true lovers of language (the elves) stop their ears with
horror at the very sound of it would be a suitable way of expressing it.
The orcs' tendency to further debase the language into ever more barbarous
dialects can be seen as a parody of the factional fighting between
Esperantists, Idists and other schismatic auxlangers.

Pete

Reply

John Cowan <cowan@...>