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