Yes....thanks...I dug a little further and the rest of the letter written in 1955 to W. H. Auden said ..."...and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic language, and my 'own language' - or series of invented languages - became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure."jahasjahas wrote:I remember researching the Tolkien thing once. It seems that his earlier Elvish languages were more clearly influenced by Finnish. The versions used in the novels, not so much. He tried to avoid any direct references to real languages. He did mention in one of his letters that "It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."
So it's the "sound" and the "feel" of his various elf languages that lean on Finnish.... A week or so ago I overheard an old man speaking a "strange" language in a rather loud voice. It sounded somewhat familiar and yet still totally incomprehensible....it also sounded beautiful, if I can put it that way... I listened for a moment...no...it wasn't Finnish....Estonian? No, not Estonian... I starting to wonder about the Sami languages when the man glanced at me...so I asked him....Hungarian...... Of course.....
But I can relate to Tolkien's sentiments about the Finnish language....maybe not with his intellectual rigour, but there is something mesmerizing about it....it's beautiful.... even something as prosaic as this has some kind of charm to it:
"Lihapiirakka kahdella nakilla."
But, of course, I wouldn't expect native speakers to understand, they've had to live with the language their whole lives....