Constructed Languages Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for designers and users of artificial or invented languages, consciously developed instead of having developed naturally. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In his Cthulhu Mythos, H. P. Lovecraft includes several snippets of the R'lyehian language, including the "Cthulhu chant":
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
We have a vocabulary list available, that gives us a decent taste of the words - for instance, 'ai means speak or call.
Does this bear any resemblance to any natural languages? Do we know the inspiration for the words?
Ostensibly, the transcription we have of R'lyehian is supposed to be a crude attempt to represent utterly inhuman sounds with the Latin alphabet. Most of what I can find on R'leyhian claims that it attempts to be an un-Earthly language: it does not distinguish between parts of speech, for example. It seems likely to me that Lovecraft at least attempted to invent a fully a priori conlang here.
I've found a Quora answer claiming the language "has basic elements of Welsh and German glottals," but it's unclear what exactly that means and where they got that information from.
