Re: cthulhu fhtagn

Aaron Grahn wrote:
>My belief (with not much basis, except that I don't think Lovecraft
>was a conlanger) is that it has no precise meaning.
I don't think he was one either ... however, why should that stop us from
speculating? :)


>I would render fhtagn as  to wait, third person singular present
>indicative, simply because "Cthulhu fhtagn" is repeated as a single
>unit, and "Cthulhu waits" makes sense in an eerie kind of way.
Hmm ... could be. I have no idea where I got the "fhtagn = dead" connection
from. As far as eerieness goes, it could even mean "to wait dead"; or how
about a fairly wide sense of "to hibernate" with grammatical particles in
the full phrase specifying deadness and/or awaitingness?


>For those who may not have read Lovecraft:
>Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
>In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
>
>The questions are: Where is the "at" in "at R'lyeh"?
Perhaps in the word itself? Human worshippers might have borrowed an
inflected form of the city's name from the mantra. See below for more on
this theory.
BTW, the lesser city by Innsmouth is "Yha-nthlei".


>Is there a significance to "'n" (repeated thrice) or "'na" (twice)?
Probably, it doesn't appear in proper names almost at all so it's likely not
merely a phoneme/cluster. "gl" is another unit that repeats thrice here but
very little in proper names.

It's also notable that both <fh> and <ph> appear as digraphs; this seems a
little unlikely. My guess is that the former has a breathy vowel of some
sort, while the latter is just /p_h/.

There's also a somewhat common -oth ending (shoggoth, Yog-Sothoth,
Yuggoth...), tho eventually a question comes up: which terms can actually be
considered to be proper middle R'lyeh (the classical language of the Deep
Ones?)


>Are the word boundaries even correctly placed? Lovecraft says that
>"the word divisions [were] guessed at from traditional breaks in the
>phrase as chanted aloud".
So the existing ones are probably correct, but there might be others? Maybe,
but we really don't have a clue where they might be... If even word
boundaries aren't known for sure, how could the transcriber use the
apostrophe to mark an enclitic? I vote for a (as clishaic as it sounds) a
glottal stop.

I also figure <'n> and <gl> might be compulsory infixes of some sort. Start
with "phi mw.f wg.ah" = "dream possessed-abode dead-wait". Infix <'na> after
the first consonant cluster of each word to refer to Cthulhu (the roots <f>
and <wg> are already governed by another word) and mark the locative by <-h>
= /h\=/ to get "ph'nai mw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'na". This only leaves the
<gl> affix. It inserts in the middle of the <mw> root and the <'na> in
<ph'nai>, but *after* the <'na> in <wgah'na>.  My best guess at the moment
is that it is some sort of a verbality marker; possession and dreaming could
be regarded as kind of participes, while "to wait" acts as an auxiliary. The
<u> in "Ph'nglui" might be due to assimilation with the [+high] of <i> and
the [+back] of <gl>.

So, "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
would translate approx. as
"dreamful-3SP possesful-3SP-abode-in Cthulhu R'lye-in dead-waits hibernate"
/p_h?nL\aI mL\w?nafh\= kt_hUKU r\`=?L@h\= wgah?naL\ fh\=taN\/
[pf)_>NL\UI]

However, I still don't know why does the <gl> appear inside the nominal
referent marker in "ph'nglui" but inside the root in "mglw'nafh"? Furher
theories welcome :)


>And, I just can't resist including this URL:
>http://cthulhu.slimyhorror.com/hpl.html. Enjoy.
>
>þ
I see your plushies and raise http://www.hello-cthulhu.com/ :b

John Vertical

Reply