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More Lovecraft

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 17:57
Back in Dec 05, Aaron Grahn posted this parsing of the famous chant from "The
Call of Cthulhu":

Ph'n     glui    mglw'n    afh  Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'n   agl fhtagn.
house-in of-him  dreams-in dead                place-in ??? waits

When I read the story a while ago, I came up with this rather different parsing:

Ph'nglui  m-   glw'na -fh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
dead      POSS house  LOC                dreaming  waits

As you see, I assumed there are no missing word boundaries, and that R'lyeh can
act as a kind of locative on its own*. Presumably, _wgah'nagl_ would further
break down into a root "to dream" plus a derivational element to turn it into a
participle.

Anyone have parsings of their own they want to share?

* It occurs to me right now that -h could be the locative ending, and that
R'lyeh might be a defective noun coinciding in NOM and LOC, or that the
cultists may mistakenly have taken an inflected form of *R'lye- as the stem.

                                            Andreas