Khuzdul
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| Khuzdûl | ||
|---|---|---|
| Created by: | J.R.R. Tolkien | 1940 |
| Setting and usage: | Middle-earth, the setting of the novel The Lord of the Rings | |
| Total speakers: | — | |
| Category (purpose): | constructed languages artistic languages Khuzdûl |
|
| Category (sources): | influenced by Hebrew in phonology and morphology | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | art | |
| ISO 639-3: | – | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Khuzdûl is the language of the Dwarves in J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction of Middle-earth. Khuzdûl is usually written with the Cirth script. It appears to be based, like the Semitic languages, on triconsonantal roots: kh-z-d, b-n-d, z-g-l.
Little is known of Khuzdûl, as the Dwarves kept it to themselves, except for their battle-cry: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! meaning Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!; and the runes written on Balin's tomb in Moria can be transliterated to read BALIN FUNDINUL UZBAD KHAZAD-DÛMU, meaning "Balin, son of Fundin, Lord of Moria". This secrecy extended to Dwarven names: with the exception of the Petty-dwarves, all Dwarven names are either from another language (Dalish) or nicknames/titles, and Dwarves don't even record their names on their tombstones. Only few non-Dwarves are recorded of having learnt Khuzdûl, most notably Eöl.
Placenames were not subject to this secrecy, and form the major sample of known Khuzdûl. Unlike their private names, Dwarves seemed eager to share these names with others.
According to the Lhammas, Khuzdûl is unique in belonging to a separate language family, Aulëan, not related to the languages of Elves, which are in the Oromëan language family. Aulëan was named from the Dwarvish tradition that it had been devised by Aulë the Smith, the Vala who created the Dwarves. It is not clear if this concept survived in later versions of the legendarium, although it seems the unique origin of Dwarvish was kept.
There are many similarities between Khuzdûl and the native tongues of men, such as Taliska, the language of the first and third houses of the Edain. This is because in the early days of Middle-earth, before men crossed the mountains into Beleriand, they had contact with the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains and further East. Taliska was the ancestor of Adûnaic, the tongue of Númenor and the direct ancestor of the Common Speech, and both languages still had some minor Khuzdûl influences.
It is said in The Silmarillion that Aulë, the creator of the first Dwarves, taught them "the language he had devised for them," which implies that Khuzdûl is technically, in reality and fictionally, a constructed language. It is also said that because of the Dwarves' great reverence for Aulë their language remained unchanged, and all clans could still speak with each other without language difficulties.
The Dwarvish language sounds much like Hebrew, and indeed Tolkien noted some similarities between Dwarves and Jews: both were "at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue…" (Letters, 176). Tolkien also commented of the Dwarves that "their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic." (BBC Radio 4 interview January 1971)
[edit] Iglishmek
Besides the aglab or spoken language, Khuzdûl had the iglishmek or sign language register. According to The War of the Jewels, this secondary tengwesta or grammar of gestures was concurrent with the spoken language, and was learned simultaneously with the aglab from earliest childhood. The dwarvish sign language was much more varied between communities than the spoken language, which remained "astonishingly uniform and unchanged both in time and in locality".
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