return

1486 the return of the king
Ents were, however, themselves skilled in tongues, learning
them swiftly and never forgetting them. But they preferred the
languages of the Eldar, and loved best the ancient High-elven
tongue. The strange words and names that the Hobbits record
as used by Treebeard and other Ents are thus Elvish, or fragments
of Elf-speech strung together in Ent-fashion. 1 Some are
Quenya: as Taurelilómëa-tumbalemorna TumbaletaurëaLómëanor,
which may be rendered ‘Forestmanyshadowed-deepvalleyblack
Deepvalleyforested Gloomyland’, and by which Treebeard
meant, more or less: ‘there is a black shadow in the deep dales
of the forest’. Some are Sindarin: as Fangorn ‘beard-(of )-tree’,
or Fimbrethil ‘slender-beech’.
Orcs and the Black Speech. Orc is the form of the name that other
races had for this foul people as it was in the language of Rohan.
In Sindarin it was orch. Related, no doubt, was the word uruk of
the Black Speech, though this was applied as a rule only to
the great soldier-orcs that at this time issued from Mordor and
Isengard. The lesser kinds were called, especially by the Urukhai,
snaga ‘slave’.
The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in
the Elder Days. It is said that they had no language of their own,
but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to
their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely
sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and
abuse. And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even
their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as
there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish
speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different
tribes.
So it was that in the Third Age Orcs used for communication
between breed and breed the Westron tongue; and many indeed
of the older tribes, such as those that still lingered in the North
1 Except where the Hobbits seem to have made some attempts to
represent shorter murmurs and calls made by the Ents; a-lalla-lallarumba-kamanda-lindor-burúme
also is not Elvish, and is the only extant
(probably very inaccurate) attempt to represent a fragment of actual
Entish.