According to Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, Tolkien believed that people had an innate ability to "hear" subtle differences in names and dialects, even if they didn't full understand why things sounded different.
Accordingly, in the area of the Shire, he gave things names dervied from English and in the area of Bree he gave things names derived from Welsh. Examples of the former are Bywater, Overhill and Willowbottom . Examples of the latter include Archet (from ar chet, "the wood"), Combe (from cwm, "valley") and Bree itself (which means "hill" in Welsh).
His aim was to drop a hint to the reader that, as the party travelled from the Shire to Bree, things had changed slightly. This was a new country, if not entirely foreign. He hoped the change in linguistics would be enough to communicate this.
There are other examples. Many dwarvish names derive from old Norse, while the Riders of Rohan, obviously, name things in old English.
But this always made me wonder: he obviously did the same thing with his fictional languages (i.e. Lothlorien - the "dream flower") but are there any other examples of this in his work derived from real-world language?
