All this came about because I was watching TTT EE late last night and my younger brother kept asking me what 'Búrarum' means. LOL

So for today's Tolkien Trivia Time, I thought we could check out a little bit about Olllllld .................. Ennn.........tishhh..

Of course he is talking about lines like this:

[Merry tries to run away but is scooped by the tree]

Tree: "Little orcs! Búrarum"

[The tree starts to walk]

Pippin: "It's talking Merry. The tree is talking."

Tree: "Tree!! I am no tree! I am an Ent."

Merry: "Tree herder! A Shepherd of the forest." ~ the two towers script.

So what does 'Búrarum' mean?! Well, we find the answer in the long-winded words of Treebeard in the book:

"There was a great inrush of those, burárum, those evil eyed - backhanded - bowlegged - fainthearted - claw fingered - foul bellied - bloodthirsty, marmite - cinchona, home, well, since you are hasty folk and their full name is as long as years of torment, those vermin of rocs."

Thus burárum = Orc. In it's shortest form. (Note the difference in accenting from the official movie script and the book... hmm I wonder which is the typo?!)

Wow, that was a quick T.T.T... Hmm I feel rather bereft.

Ok, lets go right back to the very beginning. Where do the Ents come from?

The Silmarillion tells us that the creation of the Ents had much to do with the creation of Dwarves. Which is an interesting twist, but explains a great deal about Gimli's attitude towards the most ancient of forests! Let's take a look...

Aulë the great Smith of the Valar fashioned the Dwarves in secret, and when Eru confronts him about what he has done, the poor smith offers (in manner reminiscent of Abraham preparing to slay Isaac) to destroy the creatures that he has made. But Eru grants them life instead and forgives Aulë his presumption. But there is a problem.

Yavanna, the lover of all growing things, who has covered all Middle Earth with her handiwork, is distressed. The Dwarves, having been forged in secret, have no relation to the other things that have been created by the Valar, and that includes her precious trees and forests:

Yavanna says "Yet because thou hiddest this thought from me until its achievement, thy children will have little love for the things of my love. They will love first the things made by their own hands, as doth their father. They will delve in the earth, and the things that grow and live upon the earth they will not heed. Many a tree shall feel the bite of their iron without pity."

But Eru has an answer. He answers her prayer of "Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!" and allows that "In the forests shall walk the Shepherds of the Trees"

Yavanna having heard Mandos' (the king of the Valar) words on behalf of Eru, goes to Aulë and says:
"Eru is bountiful... now let thy children beware! For there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they will arouse at their peril"

Aulë's reply? '"Nonetheless, they will have need of wood" said Aulë, and he went on with his smithy work.' ~ The Silmarillion, Ch 2: Of Aulë and Yavanna.

Aulë's final comment on the matter always tickles me. It’s a great line. Very wry humor. The Professor was good at that!

Anyhow, that is how the Ents came about. They were put to sleep until the time when the Firstborn - the Elves - were awakened to begin their life upon Middle Earth. At that time the Great Forest covered the whole land between Mirkwood and the Ered Luin. Fangorn, Mirkwood and the Old Forest on the borders of Buckland are all the last remnants of that ancient woodland. The Elves wandered through the forests westward towards the sea and roused the trees as they went teaching them speech.
Thus Entish began as a mimicry of the earliest form of Quenya. And this shows in some of the words Treebeard uses.

For example: 'Laurelindórenan lindelorendor malinorélian ornemalin' is a string of Quenya words linked together. It is not Old Entish but it gives a good idea of how it may have started.

Laurelindórenan was the old name for Lothlorien. The whole phrase translates as literally: Golden-song-land vale song-gold-land gold-tree-beach tree-golden. Or rather 'The valley where the trees in a golden light sing musically, a land of music and dreams; there are yellow trees there, it is a tree-yellow land.'

Notice how the name basically describes in detail what the Golden Wood is like. Entish worked like this, stringing together alliterative words that each gave another layer of description to the thing you were naming. (Treebeard even says that "Real names tell the story of things in Old Entish, as you might say.") Because of this it could be very specific.

Just like the Eskimos have many hundreds of names for snow. Each describes a slightly different type. Entish describes objects in great detail. Jim Allan (Tolkien Scholar) says that:

"A great increase in distinctions of vowel-color, tone and quantity ought to have made possible the transmission of a greater amount of data in less time than in any human language. That Entish was still an unbelievably slow means of transmitting information by human terms indicates how uninterested in haste the Ents were. But it would have been an exceedingly precise tongue."

It's true that having such a precise language should have resulted in a much speedier transmission of information.. But as Treebeard says: 'It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to." (II:68).

You see that the way Ents describe things is like a very verbose and involved kind of poetry, with repetitions upon repetitions upon repetitions, with slight variations. If there was anything that we humans could call a sentence, then it might proceed in a sort of spiral fashion, winding in to the main point, and then winding out again, touching all along the way on what has already been said and what will be said. This can be seen in the Quenya he uses and in the description of the Orcs.

But neither of those things is Entish precisely. One was Elvish and the other Westron. So what is Entish?!?!

Well, to begin with, we do get many hints about how Old Entish sounded. It is (apparently) filled with many interjections and articles, seen in words like hoom; and in phrases like, "Hoom hm, hoom hm, how did it go? Room tum, room tum, roomty toom tum." [Treebeard, TTT]. And as we know it is slow and rather musical. Sounds may have differed in meaning according to the pitch they were voiced at, Merry and Pippin say:

"...it sounded like boom boom rumboom boorar boom boom dahar boom boom dahar boom, and so on with a constant change of note and rhythm. Now and again they thought they heard an answer, a hum or a given sound, that seemed to come out of the earth, or from the boughs above their heads, or perhaps from the holes of trees"

It could be assumed that Old Entish is sung rather than spoken; each vowel or consonant had many tones, which altered meaning. It is also likely that, to conserve time, more than one Ent talked at a time, observed by the Hobbits during the Entmoot: "The Ents began to murmur slowly, first one joined and then another, until they were all chanting together in a long rising and falling rhythm, now louder on one side of the ring, now dying away there and rising into a great boom on the other side." [Treebeard, TTT]

Ok Ok I know I'm teasing you now. I still haven't told you what Entish is just what it sounded like to the hobbits and a few exclamations that Treebeard makes.. But to be entirely truthful, we only have one real example. Which makes my job a little difficult.

"A-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burúmë,"

This is pure entish - although only a section of the entire word.

Of it Treebeard says:” I do not know what the word is in outside languages, you know, the thing we are on, where I stand and look out on fine mornings, and think about the sun, and the grass beyond the wood, and the horses, and the clouds, and the unfolding of the world."

This description attaches emotional connotations to the word 'hill', and explains (in detail that may get repetitive to the non-Entish speaker) exactly what a hill is.

So finally after all that (though you could hardly expect a description of Old Entish to be hasty now could you?!) we can surmise that the Ents try to honor things through their language, so they use a long, winding description to describe exactly how they felt about the object, and its place in the world.

Which is why when Treebeard learns the Westron name for hill, he is rather displeased, for 'it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here since this part of the world was shaped!'.

I'll leave you with the description Tolkien himself gives of Entish in Appendix F:

"The language that they had made was unlike all others: slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the lore masters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing. They used it only among themselves; but had no need to keep it secret, for no others could learn it."

And that, my friends, is Entish down to a T!