Originally posted by Monique
Name some?
"As his career attests, Tolkien loved languages: the more mellifluous and grammatically complex the better. As a young man, Tolkien learned a variety of medieval Germanic languages, including Old English, Old Norse, and Gothic. He also discovered to his delight the Celtic language Welsh, which was to eventually become the inspiration for his "younger" Elvish language Sindarin. Another turning point, however, came when he obtained a copy of a Finnish grammar. "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me" he wrote years later. This interest in Finnish would lead not only to his use of the Kalevala, as detailed above, but also to the form and details of his "high" Elvish language, Quenya.
One of the most obvious signs of Finnish influence on Quenya lies in its words. Tolkien borrowed some Quenya words directly from Finnish: for example, tul- "to come," derives from the Finnish verb of the same meaning, tulla. Similarly, the Quenya word for "path," tië, finds an exact counterpart in the Finnish word tie, "road." Other loans are evident, but less direct: for example, the Quenya word for "gift," anna, probably derives from the Finnish verb root anta-/anna-, meaning "to give." Helge Kåre Fauskangor, a Norwegian Tolkien enthusiast and a prodigious scholar of Tolkien's Elvish languages, has suggested that even the name Quenya (derived from the Quenya verb quen, "to speak") may owe its origin to the medieval Scandinavian word for Finns, cwenas, kven. Still other Quenya words look tantalizingly Finnish, albeit with a shift in meaning: for example, Quenya cirja is phonologically identical to the Finnish word for "book," kirja. But the Quenya word means not "book" but "high-prowed ship." Perhaps for Tolkien, as for his millions of readers afterward, books are truly "ships" of the imagination.
Tolkien's real indebtedness to Finnish, however, becomes apparent when we look at the grammar with which he endowed his high Elvish language. Like Finnish, Quenya is rich in suffixes that alter the meaning of the noun or verb to which they are attached. Many Quenya suffixes are drawn directly from Finnish. Finnish is also an agglutinative language, which means that it may add multiple suffixes to its words to further augment or refine their meanings. Noun suffixes can be used to convey location, number (singular or plural), and even ownership. Thus, for instance, the Finnish word kirjoissani is made up of the following parts: kirja (the noun "book"), -i- (a plural marker), -ssa (a case ending meaning "in"), and -ni (a possessive marker meaning "my"). Together, these syllables express the same meaning as the English phrase "in my books." Tolkien's Quenya follows its source closely, although it requires that the suffixes be added in a different order. Thus the Quenya parmanyassen can be broken down into the components parma ("book"),nya- ("my"), -sse- ("in"), and -n (plural marker)."
From:
http://www.amscan.org/tolkien.html
