More about Quenya's relation to Finnish in the Net

The Web

• The Finnicization of Quenya (Men Eldalambínen; direct link to PDF)
  Petri Tikka, originally published in Arda Philology 1 (2007)

  The phonology and morphology of Quenya and its earlier forms are compared with Finnish in great detail. According to the author, late Quenya shows more similarities to Finnish in these areas than the earliest Qenya.

• Similarities between 'real' languages and Tolkien's Eldarin
  Roman Rausch, 2005

  A very complete and serious discussion of resemblances in vocabulary. Most importantly, Tolkien's method of working and his own comments about suggested influences are taken into account.

• Quenya and Finnish : A linguistic examination of the alleged connection between J.R.R. Tolkien's Quenya and Finnish [not available when last checked]
  Jonas Rosén, 2004

  This Master's thesis takes a detailed look into the topic. Unfortunately, some (rather shaky) claims from my article seem to have been accepted.

• Identifying England's Lönnrot (HTML) (PDF)
  Anne C. Petty, Tolkien Studies, Volume 1, 2004

  The article deals with Tolkien's relationship with the Finnish Kalevala. The Quenya-Finnish connection is also mentioned. New to me was the idea that the Feanorian letters would somehow have been influenced by the visual appearance of printed Finnish.

• Lord of the Strings (Part 1) and Lord of the Strings (Part 2)
  Simon White (2004?)

  A list of words and names (mostly in Quenya and Sindarin) from Tolkien's works has been compared to wordlists of real languages to find the closest match for each "Tolkien word". A custom string similarity metric has been used in the comparison. The author suggests that the high number of closest matches in an English wordlist is significant.

TolkLang, Elfling, and Lambengolmor

• Kalevala & Qenya
  Christopher Gilson, 2003-09-13, Lambengolmor

  A discussion of what could have been the first Finnish text Tolkien ever saw and how it may have influenced early Qenya. The subsequent messages in this thread, such as Petri Tikka's list of familiar-looking words in the Quenya Lexicon, are also highly recommended.

• Re: Similarities between Elvish and real-world languages
  Edward J. Kloczko, 2003-03-31, Lambengolmor

  It is stated that without the author's confirmation, we cannot know whether a word in one of Tolkien's languages has been inspired by a word in some real language. Tolkien's own comments about chance resemblances are quoted to support this.

• Re: Two syntactic questions
  Ryszard Derdzinski, 2000-12-03, Elfling

  It is noted here that Tolkien's influences from real languages mostly had to do with phonetic structure rather than grammar.

• Re: Two syntactic questions
  David Kiltz, 2000-12-02, Elfling

  Here, Latin is described as being less important as a model for Quenya than e.g. Finnish.

• Kvenja? Kynjä?
  David Salo, 2000-07-02, Elfling

  A Finnicized version of Tolkien's Quenya poem Namárië. In addition to demonstrating some of the similarities and differences of the two languages, this poem is also great fun to read, for a Finnish speaker at least. Personally, I can't help thinking of High-elven as "kynjä" nowadays...

• Re: middle earth languages
  B. Philip Jonsson, 2000-06-22, Elfling

  A comment on the models of Quenya's phonology (Spanish, Finnish and Greek are listed), plus an example of "Finno-Quenya".

• Finnish and Slavic influences
  Joseph Valles, 1999-02-12, TolkLang

  Some information concerning Tolkien's knowledge of Finnish from Carpenter's biography of the Inklings.

• Re: 'velike' and Finnish (see message 1 in the digest)
  Kimmo Valtonen, 1999-02-11, TolkLang

  The writer criticizes the idea that Tolkien would have been "heavily influenced" by Finnish, and points out many fundamental differences between Finnish and Quenya.

• Re: Digest: Alexander / laryngeals
  B. Philip Jonsson, 1998-03-29, TolkLang

  Some very interesting remarks on the relationship of Elvish and Uralic languages.

Newsgroups

• Quenya - Finnish wordlist (part 1)
  Ahma, 2000-06-12, alt.fan.tolkien

  A list of Quenya words that closely resemble or are identical to a Finnish word (ignoring meaning). Quenya Lexicon Index and Quenya Corpus Wordlist at Ardalambion have been used as sources. As far as I know, the second part of this wordlist has not been published.