Happy Birthday HPL

In light of recent events (id est the birthday of the revolutionary author H.P. Lovecraft), I've been sifting through the old books of his in my library, and today I came across the little black Del Ray edition of "At the Mountains of Madness", which was actually the first story I ever read of his and made a big impression on me. The edition I have is from the '60's, and belonged to my father many years ago. That was when I was first introduced to the entity of Cthulhu, and soon after I'd read The Call of Cthulhu, in which Mr. Lovecraft mentions the ancient and cryptic language which Cthulhu's cult speaks, including an excerpt from the language:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."


In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming. I don't know if Mr. Lovecraft simply made this up, if he actually devised a language behind this or if it was in fact transmitted to him through a dream, which perhaps he came to know enough of to parse or translate the phrase into English. In any case, there have been many attempts to interpret and create a constructed language based on this sample and various others throughout his writings, so-called "R'lyehian".

In typical Lovecraftian fashion, the language is given no normalcy in features that are usually present in human languages; as such, it is very alien and comes off as something very strange and foreign. An example of the aforementioned sample being parsed comes from the Yog-Sothoth forums online.


For example, they translate the last word fhtagn as sleep, and it is commonly accepted that the verb-final position corresponds to the clause's central verb. The R'lyeh wgah'nagle is interpreted as in his house at R'lyeh. An example of more atomic parsing is interpreting, for instance, the agl of wgah'nagl as a locative suffix that denotes the place of R'lyeh, such as the English preposition in, while wgah'n is the verb to reside or wait. Of course, this is all conjecture; the radical assessment of these sparse fragments are necessary for those who want to form an entire conlang after it. Perhaps those whose dreams take them distant places won't need to search that far at all...


One can devise one's own interpretation of the phrase, as I personally believe Mr. Lovecraft would have wanted his readers to :)

So, Happy Birthday Mr. Lovecraft. You are probably dreaming somewhere, existing in the far dream worlds beyond the threshold of our world. Much like in The Silver Key, you saw your fate coming, and you left this world voluntarily for the ones beyond...

Happy Dreaming.

 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, born 20 August, 1890. † 15 March, 1937.