Re: Trollspeak

At 10:58 am -0500 25/2/99, Brian Betty wrote:
>On 2-24-99, Andrew Smith wrote: "It still sounds more like troll to me;
>"'Ere, 'oo are yoo?" as in the Hobbit."
>
>On 2-24-99, you wrote: "Trolls in "The Hobbit" - a very different matter.
>Until the finsal chapters, "The Hobbit" belongs to a rather different genre
>than TLOTR, IMHO."
>
>Hmm. But let's be fair: the Trolls long lost their ability to speak the
>Black Speech or its descendants; they quickly adopted the local dialect. It
>was my understanding that the hobbit trolls were talking in the local
>speechpattern, which was for reasons of 'colour' chosen to sound like
>non-BBC English. So that weren't the Black Speech, it were the local colour
>(of Bree, wasn't it? I admit I have forgotten!).
Possibly.  Yes, the Trolls appear in Chapter II of 'The Hobbit' and they
speek neither 'BBC English' nor "the Queen's English" :)  But there is
nothing there to make it Cockney rather than any of the many other
'sub-standard' (NOT my term) dialects of England.

>
>I think those are the only trolls which speak in any of the books - we
>never hear a conversation with another, do we? I know we have orks, great
>orks, and other nasties, but so far as I can tell no other trolls speak ...
I don't recall any others either.

And re-reading Chapter II I find it wasn't wrong about the early part of
"The Hobbit" - it's a children's story.  The language & tone are very
different from the later TLOR; but I do admit that the tone & language
change quite noticeably after Bilbo reaches Rivendell and before the end we
are not far off from TLOR.

Certainly, the Trolls do _not_ speak the Black Speech and nothing whatever
IMHO can be inferred from Chapter II of "The Hobbit" about the Black Speech
or the way orcs spoke Westron (the Common Tongue).   Indeed, I think we are
very much agreed on this.

Ray.