Since I had so little direct linguistic information about Black Speech to go on other than what could be gleaned from the Ring-inscription (object suffixes -ul, -ulûk; verbal infinitive (perhaps) ending -at; abstract ending -um in burzum “darkness”, containing the same burz element seen in Lugbúrz “Dark Tower”; postposition -ishi “in”) I had to go on à priori notions of what a language such as Black Speech might be like — I had to get inside the mind of Sauron, and try to figure out what somebody like the Dark Lord of Mordor might put into his language.

As a matter of fact, this is something I had thought about some years before. As an undergraduate in college, I had contributed to a set of ongoing stories, where each participant wrote additional chapters and introduced characters and events as he or she pleased. Into one of these stories I introduced the character (played partly for humor, partly tragically) of a misfit Orc who, sometime after the fall of Mordor, had found himself transported through time and space into a new environment. On introducing this Orc, I thought it would add a touch of realism to let him speak in his own language; so I sketched the outline of what I imagined Black Speech might be like, and wrote a couple of paragraphs in it.

I have no idea if any copy of this text survives somewhere in my files. At any rate, I made no direct use of it, except for one small element that I retained in memory, the first person pronoun za — possibly suggested by Avestan azəm.

What I did retain, however, was the overall notion of Black Speech as a complex but consistent language, rich in affixation and inflection, but with a wholly transparent morphology. Indeed, the transparency of the morphology, the lack of any phonetic alterations between morphemes that could obscure the structure, would help explain the prevalence of clashing consonant clusters; morphemes ending in one consonant were jammed up against morphemes beginning in another, with nothing to ease the transition.

Sauron, I imagined, was an enormously practical person, who would have made the Black Speech as “perfect” (according to his notions of perfection) as he could make it, with a rigorous consistency and logic, but without making any allowance for æsthetics. It would not eschew borrowings from other languages of Middle-earth, but it would adapt them to its own style. It would in fact have been, as my friend Helge Fauskanger terms it, Sauron’s Esperanto.

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To quote Richard:

The way to find the texts in the languages of Middle-earth was difficult. First of course was the careful and watchful hearing in the cinemas. Richard traveled far from Poland to Ireland to watch the movie 2 weeks before the Polish premiere. The first results were published thanks to the work of Miriam “Niranare” Simon of the German forum Mellyn Lammath and Cerebrum of the Hungarian website Parf-en-Ereglas. Then the international community of the Tolkien linguists with Helge K. Fauskanger (of Norse Ardalambion) and Andrew Higgins (of Elfling list) helped to find the detailed explanation of David Salo’s conlang forms.

The dialogues, together with lyrics and inscriptions, in the languages of Tolkien were created for the movies by David Salo, an American linguist. Richard’s analysis is a work in progress, continually updated based on suggestions from fans contributed via comments to his blog-style posts, and the results of his work on The Hobbit thus far can be found as follows:

• Analysis of the Sindarin dialogues.
• Analysis of the Quenya, Khuzdûl/Neo-Khuzdûl, and Orkish/Gundabad dialect of the Black Speech dialogues.
• Analysis of the lyrics in the soundtrack can be found here and here.
• Analysis of the runic inscriptions (scroll down to the section titled INSCRIPTIONS).

The analyses of the dialogues, lyrics and inscriptions in the Lord of the Rings films can be found at Elvish.org.

Elendilion.pl is also famous for the investigation of the oldest ancestry of the Tolkien family. This family name emerges for the first time in the mediaeval sources of the German Order in Prussia, in small village in today’s Poland, Tołkiny, cf. http://www.elendilion.pl/2010/02/02/tokiny-in-warmia-a-nest-of-the-tolkien-family-ii/