Tack för en intressant tråd, Ohlmarxisten! Jag hade inte alls reflekterat över de här namnen tidigare!
Efter att ha fått ta del av "bevismaterialet" håller jag med om att det låter högst troligt att Tolkien i praktiken har bildat dessa namn på samma sätt som Shelob, genom att sätta samman mer eller mindre vanliga engelska komponenter till något som tillsammans skall låta "orkiskt" . Men däremot är jag ändå inte säker på att man borde översätta namnen. Att använda svenska sammansättningar istället för originalen skulle oundvikligen ge en lite annan klang i det som skall föreställa "orkiska" än vad Tolkien avsåg. Är det inte viktigare att få den klangen rätt än att få med den i sammanhanget ändå oviktiga betydelsen? Det
skulle ju dessutom kunna vara svarta språket, och Tolkiens egna språk får man som översättare självklart inte mackla med. Detta då till skillnad från Shelob, där vi vet med säkerhet att det skall föreställa engelska. (I den mån Guiden räknas som kanon - men det väljer nog jag att göra i alla fall!)
Men OK, om vi nu ändå leker med tanken att översätta namnen:
Rottbur och
Dritsak, hur låter det? Eller kanske låter
Rottrag mer orkiskt?
Det här utdraget ur Appendix F är för övrigt väl värt att läsa i sammanhanget. (Ohlmarxisten har självklart redan läst det!
Men någon av er andra kanske har missat det?) Det förklarar bland annat hur Shagrat och Gorbag faktiskt
skulle kunna vara (även inom historien och inte bara i Tolkiens skaparprocess) namn bildade ur människors ord. Men det kan lika gärna vara mer eller mindre förvanskade komponenter ur alviska eller svarta språket.
Citera:
Orcs and the Black Speech. Orc is the form of the name that other races had for this foul people as it was in the language of Rohan. In Sindarin it was orch. Related, no doubt, was the word uruk of the Black Speech, though this was applied as a rule only to the great soldier-orcs that at this time issued from Mordor and Isengard. The lesser kinds were called, especially by the Uruk-hai, snaga 'slave'.
The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in the Elder Days. It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse. And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different tribes.
So it was that in the Third Age Orcs used for communication between breed and breed the Westron tongue; and many indeed of the older tribes, such as those that still lingered in the North and in the Misty Mountains, had long used the Westron as their native language, though in such a fashion as to make it hardly less unlovely than Orkish. In this jargon tark, 'man of Gondor', was a debased form of tarkil, a Quenya word used in Westron for one of Númenorean descent; see III, 54.
It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him, but he failed in that purpose. From the Black Speech, however, were derived many of the words that were in the Third Age wide-spread among the Orcs, such as ghâsh 'fire', but after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgûl. When Sauron arose again, it became once more the language of Barad-dûr and of the captains of Mordor. The inscription on the Ring was in the ancient Black Speech, while the curse of the Mordor-orc in II, 53. was in the more debased form used by the soldiers of the Dark Tower, of whom Grishnákh was the captain. Sharkû in that tongue means old man.