Cthulhu
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The Tongue of R'lyeh
Every word glossed. Every source named. No sense silently discarded.
The translation surfaces here as you type…
G fan glossary (the scholarly senses)
LJ LingoJam table (what the community decoder says)
D derived / canon compound
⚓ spoken by the chain itself (miner.cpp Dreaming lexicon)
? affix guess
— unknown, left untouched — click any word for its full entry
Why This Translator
Three vocabularies of R'lyehian exist, and they do not agree.
| Source | What it is | How we use it |
|---|---|---|
| The fan glossary | "R'lyehian as a Toy Language" — the scholarly reconstruction assembled on alt.horror.cthulhu and the Yog-Sothoth forums from Lovecraft's own fragments and his heirs' | Primary meanings. Multi-sense glosses shown in full |
| The LingoJam tables | The community's habitual decoder. It flattened the glossary: each word decodes only to the first gloss in its table, and missing words are silently mangled | Shown alongside, labeled, so you know what others will read |
| The chain lexicon | The 32 words of miner.cpp — the only words the OFF chain itself speaks in its post-canon Dreaming blocks | Marked with the anchor ⚓ wherever they surface |
fhtagn means wait, and sleep, and dream — the Old Ones experience these as one condition, and a translator that keeps only the first has already lied to you. Words we cannot source are left standing, marked, untranslated: better an honest gap than confident nonsense. Verbs have only present and not-present tense; taken out of context, any fragment's translation is guesswork — this page shows you the guesswork instead of hiding it.
The Words the Chain Speaks
Since the canon was read in full, every Dreaming block inscribes verses drawn from these 32 words alone
The Glossary
The full fan reconstruction, with canon compounds derived by its own morphology
