Very cool! Those spurious French connections are exactly what I meant when I said a lot of the Hurrian connections were a stretch. If you want there to be a connection you can probably find words that sound vaguely similar and have a tangentially related range of meanings, you can probably make it seem like any two languages are related!guyome wrote:Interesting, thanksTolkien actually mentions Erech/Uruk in one of his letters (Letter 297), I quote parts of it below.
I'm not buying the Black Speech/Hurrian connection. First, it reminds me too much of the Altaic language family/Sprachbund controversy, where you compare vaguely similar roots having some vague degree of semantic closeness and claim they are proof of an "Altaic" substrate. And if none is to be found, you can 1) enhance the formal similarity by positing any sound change you wish or 2) enhance the semantic side of things by letting your imagination roam free (the entries for burz/wur- or krimp/ker-imbu seem especially guilty of that to me).
Taking the following (and that's already supposing the data used here for Hurrian is accurate),
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Second (and much more interesting), knowing a bit about how much pleasure Tolkien derived from creating his languages and how much thought he put in them, I find it ludicrous to think that Tolkien would have surrendered his creative genius in this matter and have the words of one of his languages simply be a copy of an existing language (in both form and meaning, no less).
Fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it because Tolkien himself wrote a long letter about this very topic (and it conveniently covers the origin of Black Speech nazg "ring"). To summarise it: he might sometimes, knowingly or not, have found the inspiration for the sounds of his creations in words already existing in other languages, but there is no link to be found as far as the meaning is concerned.
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It's interesting that he unintentionally used the name of the Sumerian city of Unug not once but twice! Once in Akkadian (Uruk), and once in Hebrew (Erech).
"Ash" as the number one could have been another subconscious borrowing. The sign for aš is one of the simplest Cuneiform signs (just a single horizontal stroke), so it's conceivable that it could have been mentioned in a book about the history of Mesopotamian writing. Or it could just be a coincidence. There are only so many syllables you can make. The most famous example is that the Mbabaram word for dog is "dog"; they thought it was a loanword at first but as it turns out it follows from regular sound changes when compared to related Pama-Nyungan languages.
Another example of a same-sounding word (although not with the same meaning) is that there is a Sumerian word "pisag̃" (meaning fish, or a kind of fish, I can't tell from the dictionary entry). It seemed really familiar to me, and it sounded like Indonesian, so I looked up and as it turns out, it is pronounced almost the same as the Indonesian word for banana (completely unrelated of course).
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