Grammar of the Language of Cthulhu

To begin with, I only had two concrete pieces of information, two words that I could definitively say what they meant: Cthulhu and R'lyeh are names, so they don't translate, and I could see them in the original sentence. The first thing that immediately stood out to me was that the translation Lovecraft gave ("In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming") couldn't be a literal word-for-word translation because in one, Cthulhu comes before R'lyeh, and in the other, after. So Cthulhu must put the words in sentences in at least a slightly different order than English. And there are more words in the English translation than the original chant, so the words can't match up perfectly with each other.

Adjectives

My next step was to identify which word meant "dead". "Dead" is a adjective: it describes a noun. And logically, in most languages it generally comes next to the noun. So "dead" will be either immediately before or immediately after "Cthulhu". This isn't true in every language, but for reasons I'll explain later I think this is the sort of language where this rule applies; even in those where it doesn't, this rule is usually at least default even if it isn't rigid. And we know it can't be "R'lyeh" because that means something else, so "mglw'nafh" means dead.

The next thing to consider is how "in his house at R'lyeh" works. "In" and "at" are prepositions, which are mysteriously absent here. While some languages let you leave those out, they typically only do that for the preposition "to", not "in". If there's no visible preposition, the next most common thing is a suffix. In Finnish, "at R'lyeh" would be "R'lyehssä" or "R'lyehllä", with -ssä and -llä acting like prepositions. However, you would expect the word to be longer in that case, because it's not only the word "R'lyeh" but also a suffix. "R'lyeh" is very short. On top of that, you would take off the suffix when translating, so there would be a small difference between the word for "R'lyeh" in English versus Cthulhu. I thought about that for a while, and couldn't figure out a direct way to get a preposition in there, and then I ultimately came up with something completely different. Although it's a known process in natural languages, I'm not aware that many constructed languages do this: I analyzed "R'lyeh" as a kind of adjective, and the language treats adjectives differently depending whether they're stage-level or individual level.

Case: Who did what to whom

So now, I have the beginning of a literal translation: "Ph'nglui dead Cthulhu at R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." Exactly half of it has been explained. Now I'm in a position to start speculating about suffixes and prefixes, and other markers. On nouns, the biggest thing is to see how you know what's the subject (who does it), the object (what they do it to), and the indirect object (anything extra: I (subject) give (verb) it (direct object) to you (indirect object)). In English, as demonstrated at the top of this page, we use the order of the words (we always say the subject, then the verb, then the object), but Latin uses suffixes, which is why everything ends in -us, -um, -ae, -i, et cetera but nothing ever ends in, say, -liv. There's always a suffix for case. For how Dzeurhka uses case, see below outside of the rationale section.

Technical note: although I originally doubted Cthulhu did this, I later realized it was more likely that he did, and this just wasn't visible due to the exact mechanics of this sentence. It's complicated, and fairly technical, but for anybody deeply interested in the logic behind my choices, for reasons I'll explain later I thought something called converbs must exist, and converbs exist almost exclusively in languages with case. Although I saw no evidence of case marking, none ought to anyway, because there's no direct object, or, by my analysis, technically an indirect object either, in which condition case or lack of it doesn't reflect the language in general. Ultimately I settled on a kind of case that accounted for all this.

Now that I've finished nouns, I can't put tense off any longer. I've been avoiding it so far, because deciding on verb tense means claiming to understand how Cthulhu perceives time, which is quite possibly impossible. So I want to state cleanly, right up front, my reasoning here: I have a structure and an implementation that I came up with. The structure, I think, is completely realistic and there aren't any strong arguments against it. My specific implementation, which deals with which tenses actually exist to fit into that structure, is almost completely of my own invention. It isn't without rationale, but it's not even remotely implied in any of Lovecraft's work. So I'll say, use my structure, my basic format for how tense actually works, but if you think the specific tenses that fit into that format aren't good or don't fit Lovecraft's style, I completely understand; you can leave out some of my tenses, or maybe add new ones, or even just strip it down to the bare bones two or three very simple tenses. I may have gotten in over my head trying to understand Cthulhu's perception of time; generally people who try that go insane.

First, I tried to think what kinds of temporal relations Cthulhu even needs to express. As his consciousness likely lasts for eons if not the entire history of the Universe, past and present may not really be meaningful to him. This idea is heavily implied in many of Lovecraft's stories. So I thought about some of the other ways that languages express time. One way I thought promising was with aspect, which doesn't say when something happened in time, but rather, at whatever time it happened, how it was distributed in time (see below). While it may still be relevant in some cases to use tense, it's likely not as essential, so you have to use a whole extra word for it.

Long complicated tangent: How does Cthulhu perceive time?

Feel free to skip.

I don't want to derail this whole page with a tangent on how I arrived at my decision of which tenses I chose to use; I may explain later, but at the moment I'll just quickly gloss it. As Call of Cthulhu, so far my main source, didn't provide much information on the nature of spacetime, I had to turn to other of Lovecraft's short stories. Ultimately, in large part helped by Beyond the Wall of Sleep, I cobbled together a tense for the present, the relatively recent past (past as experienced by humans, not eons ago), and the relatively near future, none of which are particularly crazy, and came up with a kind of arrow of time that went in a spiral. Personally, and I stress this is my personal idea just so that some idea is out there to build off of, I decided that based on Beyond the Wall of Sleep's emphasis on how time did not necessarily flow linearly, but obviously it does in the very short term, you can think of time as going in a kind of spiral, repeatedly coming back to the same or a somewhat similar point, but somehow not exactly the same. So millenia from now, the events of the French Revolution might repeat almost identically; but they might occur in Kazakhstan instead of France, and the king woudn't be named Louis. I propose a fourth tense for things that are far enough into the past and future that they've gone all the way around in a circle at least once and it's no longer relevant to think of past and future as different directions. And then of course there's no guarantee that higher beings such as Cthulhu even experience the same time that we do, so there may be other tenses that we can't even define.

Of course, it needn't be a perfect spiral. It could be a circle, or a square helix, or even just a chaotic meandering line. I thought a spiral had the most potential. It also hasn't been done to death.

So to quickly recap that philosophical tangent, there are tenses for past, present, future, and very distant times, plus maybe some beyond human comprehension. All of them are marked by an extra word before the verb, like English "did", "do", and "will". However, it's not mandatory; an action that happened in the past doesn't need a past tense marker if it isn't essential to know when it happened.