Midnight RPG - Orcish Written Language

NOTE: This is a collaborative effort. If you have any suggestions or changes you would like to make, please create a new subsection marked with your name. Thanks!

Andrew

"The hosts of Izrador contain far more sorts of foul creatures than just orcs, and none of these have the orcs’ facility with language. As a result, the armies and agents of Izrador use a language the dwarves call Black Tongue. It is a simple tongue that even the most dim-witted ogre is able to master. They use this language when encamped, on patrol, or fighting together. Many of the non-orc races of Izrador’s horde have begun using the language exclusively, even when among only their own kind. Because of its simplicity, Black Tongue can only be used at pidgin competence." - Midnight: Second Edition, pp. 160

As described in the main Midnight campaign book, Black Tongue is an extremely simple language that is nonetheless useable to convey everything that the Shadow's non-orcish minions might need to communicate with one another. Since no further information on the language appears in any Midnight supplements (so far as I know), I have come up with the following on my own.

Black Tongue has no alphabet per se, but every word in its lexicon is made up of 104 distinct syllables (Agh, Bur, Il, Ish, Krim, Pat, Ren, Ul, Vor, Zha and Zum, to name a few), which can be combined in thousands of different ways. "Aghbur" is a word, as are "Ishzum" and "Ulren". No single word is more than four syllables long, although compound words are common. There are words for only fourteen numbers: 1 through 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000, as well as for a few other specific numbers, such as "a dozen" or "a fist".

Spending time around Kyuad and Zal'Kazzir has made Durgaz interested in the possibilities presented by written language. He briefly considered asking Zal or Kyuad to teach him to read Courtier or Colonial, but decided against it, instead trying to puzzle out the fundamentals of the written word by himself. In the process, he has created something entirely new: a heretofore nonexistent written variant of Black Tongue, the simplest language he knows.

The actual creation of the alphabet was simple: assigning a unique symbol to each of the 104 syllables that make up the Black Tongue. Examples:

Agh: @
Bur: #
Il: %
Ish: ^
Krim: $
Pat: &
Ren: *
Shi: ]
Ul: (
Vor: !
Zha: )
Zum: ?

Thus, "Agh burzum-ishi krimpatul!" (Out of darkness bind them!) becomes: @ #?^] $&(

Over the past few weeks on his "off-time", Durgaz has been steadily compiling a master key of the symbols he has devised for each syllable in the Black Tongue and inscribing it on the giant worg hide he got from Ossion using a heated dagger-point. The 104 symbols were easy to write down. Clarifying the meaning of each one was harder. The solution was to use a rebus-puzzle approach, of sorts -- under the spot where all 104 symbols were written down, he has recorded two columns containing, in each row, a simple picture of something followed by the symbols representing its syllables.

Example: A picture of a shield, called a "zhabur" in Black Tongue, followed by the symbols for "Zha" and "Bur": )#
And on the next row: a picture of a boro, called an "ishipat" in Black Tongue, followed by the symbols for "Ish", "Shi" and "Pat": ^]&

Assuming that the words are picked so as not to overlap too much in terms of what syllables they use, and assuming at least two syllables per word, the entire "dictionary" can be summed up in somewhere between thirty and fifty rows. And anyone with a familiarity with Black Tongue, and knowing that each symbol represents a syllable, can pick up the hide and easily figure out what syllable is represented by what symbol. Looking at the two examples above, it's easy to figure out that, say, "zhapat" would be )&.

Surprisingly simple. The trickiest part, honestly, would be memorizing the 104 symbols, and Durgaz will specifically be choosing symbols that are vaguely relatable to common words using the syllables they represent. (He's not, obviously, actually using number signs and brackets.) The best part is that it should be useable to communicate anything that can be spoken in Black Tongue, thanks to the sheer simplicity of the language. Thank the ogres for making that necessary.

Bill

On the number of characters:
The Cherokee syllabary has 84 characters, and it boasts one of the highest learning and retention rates of any written language anywhere (maybe the Cherokee are just smarter, hehe). I think black tongue could get away with 60-70 characters.

One option (maybe for the development of orcish) might be to make the written language be a syllabic alphabet. In these, each character has an inherant vowel that can be changed or muted with a diacritic. This simplifies the language by requiring the reader to learn the diacritics for the vowel sounds, and then a collection of 30-40 consonants. This is closer to an alphabet, however. Ethiopic, one of the oldest writing systems in the world, and Inuktitut (sort of), which is less than a century old, are both examples. Inuktitut is normally classified as a syllabary because each character is different, but only because they are mirrored or rotated. Rotating a letter to change it isn't much different than adding two little circles to the top of it.

Andrew

I like that idea for the later written adaptation of Orcish. However, one of the main points I wanted to make with the written version of Black Tongue was that it could be picked up with relative ease by beings who had no previous knowledge of any written language. The one syllable = one character system works very well for this; you see a picture of something with a two-syllable name followed by a 'word' made up of two characters, and now you know what syllables those two characters represent. Given orcs' capacity for language, I'd bet most of them could commit it to memory in a week. (Assuming they had the skill points to spend ... </metagame>)

If the Cherokee syllabary only has 84 characters, I'd say we could get away with lowering Black Tongue to, oh, 67. The Cherokee people were obviously a lot smarter than ogres, orcs and filthy, filthy goblins, and besides, the Black Tongue seems mostly limited to short, gutteral bursts. How many different elaborations on "ugh!" do you really need?