title_body: What similarities does The Black Speech in Tolkien have to Hurrian? I've just come across this quote from Wikipedia:
  
  
    Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski claimed a strong similarity to Hurrian, which had recently been partially deciphered at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.
  
  
  How similar are they, actually? What similarities do they have? Grammatical structure? Vocabulary? Is it even possible to tell, seeing how few examples of the Black Speech we have?
upvoted_answer: Well, The Font of All Knowledge (a.k.a. Wikipedia) tells us several things:
  
  
  There is not much similarity as far as phonology, as Hurrian seems to lack consonant voicing distinction (except in certain circumstances). BS clearly has this distinction.
  There's not enough BS to determine much by way of grammar, but Hurrian seems to be extremely agglutinative; BS doesn't appear to be at all.
  Hurrian seems to have more vowels.
  BS has more consonant clusters.
  
  
  Upon reading this analysis of Black Speech, I think it is clear that Professor Tolkien must have taken some words &amp; grammatical forms into BS from Hurrian. For example: 
  
  
  -at &lt; Hurrian -ed- formant of jussive/intended future in verbal form formant of future in verbs
  -ûk &lt; “All”, “completeness”; Hurrian -ok, formant with a meaning “fully, truthfully, really” in a verbal form.
  
  
  Hurrian texts were known since discoveries in the 1910s &amp; 1930s. A grammar wasn't published until 1941. Based on the Analysis, I think it very likely that Prof. Tolkien gained inspiration from the Hurrian direction. I'm not sure I'd agree with "strong similarity" based on the extreme paucity of BS evidence. More evidence, a lost grammar, those would be more convincing one way or the other.