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RFV 2007
Latest comment: 16 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion
Already cited; I can cite more books as well if need be. Relates to the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. Was originally an invented phrase but continues to see use. sewnmouthsecret23:15, 5 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
If we're keeping this, we should explain with Usage notes that the phrase appears in English fiction, and so is technically English, but is intended to represent an ancient (fictitious) language as conceived by H. P. Lovecraft. --EncycloPetey00:38, 6 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I'd call it interlingual (as it is not translated when the surrounding text is). However, I doubt we should have this entry at all - maybe Cthulhu fhtagn! bd2412T00:47, 6 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I'd agree with the interlingual, except I have found a few cites where it bears no translation at all. I didn't expect to place this entry, but when researching it on b.g.c. I found it was easily citable, without direct translations in some cases, and worth having its own entry. Anyone reading a book with this without a translation may want to see what it means; I have also seen this phrase by itself on a commercial t-shirt website. sewnmouthsecret14:33, 6 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
With the number of cites, well-formatted layout, and meeting every instance of CFI (there are google scholar hits too), I will mark this RFVpassed, unless anyone objects.
There is already a body of serious scholarship literature on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, so I've no doubt a similar corpus will materialize for HP. --EncycloPetey23:11, 8 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
DC- I had already agreed to only do a concordance. If terms are in use- they belong here. If not, they don't. I'm not trying to be a boundary pusher- just looking to include terms that are in use. If you object to anything I do, please let me know. sewnmouthsecret00:53, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
RFD 2013
Latest comment: 11 years ago38 comments12 people in discussion
Not sure about the SoP rationale. I believe this should be deleted, though, because I can't see a sound argument for its being English. Even Lovecraft, who coined it, did not treat it as English in his story. Equinox◑19:46, 11 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Lovecraftian horror is a literary sub-genre of its own, and this phrase is widely used in it.
So would you have us list (say) "imzadi" as English, because many Star Trek novels use it as a word for lover (approximately) in the Betazoid language? Equinox◑20:01, 11 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
How does Lovecraftian horror being a sub-genre justify this in terms of the CFI? It is not used in English as a phrase with any meaning. It is only ever used as Lovecraftian chant. Show me a cite where it is actually used with some semantic significance. This is equivalent to having the full text of lorem ipsum as an entry as if it actually means something. Or Sinatra's "do be do be do". SpinningSpark21:55, 11 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
People might think this is an in-universe term (thus would need cites outside Lovecraftian horror,) but it’s not, because the universe of Lovecraft’s novels has spawned a literary genre. It has as much semantic significance as Allahu akbar or Sieg Heil. — Ungoliant(Falai)22:23, 11 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, to the extent that if I walked up to the average person on the street and said "Allahu akbar" or "Sieg Heil", they would assign meaning to my statement and respond accordingly; but, if I walked up to that person and said, "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", they would probably respond no differently than if I said, "frzibble blopgr clamadamadoo bzoink". bd2412T23:50, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Lovecraftian horror is not as well known as Nazism or Islam. Not even close. Don’t get me wrong; I totally understand why this entry is being RFDed, and I can see it’s borderline at best, but I’m not too happy with the reasons being given. Being used in a context that’s not popular with the average person is no reason to delete anything, and it’s certainly not SOP. What is it a SOP of anyway? Of 6 entries I’m going to create if this is deleted as SOP, that’s what! — Ungoliant(Falai)00:12, 14 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
But being used in an unpopular context is not the RFD reason: it's the fact that it isn't English, but a fictional other language. Equinox◑00:17, 14 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
In the TR discussion SpinningSpark said “ can demonstrably be shown to be widely used in English sentences. The same cannot be said of ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.” and above BD said “if I walked up to that person and said, "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", they would probably respond no differently than if I said, "frzibble blopgr clamadamadoo bzoink".” In both cases, as far as I can tell (sorry in advance if I’m understanding you wrong!), they have a problem with the term not being widely used in English sentences, and with it not being known by the average person respectively.
I dispute that this is not English. If I publish a novel and one of its fictional-language words gets uses in three English works independent from it, then it’s a word that should be listed by us under the ==English== heading, even though deep down it’s a fictional-language word. This is what happened to mithril and Qaplah' and to much smaller widespreadness, ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. — Ungoliant(Falai)00:35, 14 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
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Ungoliant, I find so much disgreeablle in what you have said, especially what you have read into my comments, that it is hard to know where to start. So lets try the order you raised them in.
Allahu akbar and Sieg Heil. These words are actually used in English sentences, if only to throw a negative aspersion on the cultures from which they came. Ph. mg. Cth. is never used in an English sentence with a meaning. Only ever as a quoatation.
The words achlorophyllaceous and spheniscan both have morphemes that clearly could be English. I correctly guessed the meaning of both despite never having heard either before. Admittedly, the latter was only due to having met w:User:Sphenisciform in hte past. Ph. mg. Cth. has no such morphemes.
The argument that the phrase is not English has nothing to do with the phrase not being popular. It has everything to do with ph. mg. Cth. never being used in an English sentence where a meaning can be assigned. A translation of a foreign phrase does not count.
There is already an entry for Cthulhu. It will be interesting to see what definitions you will give for the entries you intend to create for the other five components of ph. mg. Cth. and how you intend to cite them in English after the inevitable RFV. SpinningSpark07:10, 14 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Except it’s not only used as a quotation.
If someone walked to me and said ph'nglui I would also know its meaning. I bet more people would know it than achloriphyllaceous, but this is no reason to delete either.
Here’s the meaning: it’s an evocation of Cthulhu, just like Sieg Heil is an evocation of the Third Reich and Allahu Akbar of Allah.
For something to be a sum of parts, there must be parts. Annus horribilis is SOP in Latin, because it is just annus + horribilis. Annus and horribilis aren’t English words, so the English expression annus horribilis can’t possibly be SOP.
However, the components are words. Are we going to have individual entries on ph'nglui, mglw'nafh, R'lyeh, wgah'nagl, and fhtagn? This raises the SoP objection of the nominator. If each of these individually are words to be included in our corpus (presumably as English words, since they belong to no other language), the the sentence structured from them is indeed SoP. I grant that we do have some slogans and other multi-word expressions, but isn't it odd that we would have this sentence which basically describes how Cthulhu lies dreaming, when the community has already expressed a consensus was to delete the phrase, I have a dream? bd2412T21:18, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Delete out of mainspace at least. Appendix if you really want to keep it - but how is this different from an ordinary English meme-like expression such as One ring to rule them all, which is also widespread? It appears (to me) that the only reason that this entry exists is because it isn't English and people want to know what it means. I would argue that all of the citations presented for this word are merely quotations of the original phrase in Lovecraft's book - just like if I were to quote One ring to rule them all in connection with the Large Hadron Collider . But neither of these terms has aquired any meaning other than pure quotation in English or any other real language. An appendix might be a mutually acceptable solution, because then it can be treated as a phrase in its own language (whatever that language is called - I don't know), and so the requirement for attestation in English/Translingual is no longer relevant. This appendix would satisfy the people want to know what it means. Hyarmendacil (talk) 08:46, 12 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Actually, a Wikiquote soft redirect is a good suggestion. I don't know much about Lovecraft's legendarium, but an appendix is going to be worthwhile if someone can make the case that this is actually a valid fictional language (Klingon, Quenya), even if the corpus consists solely of this phrase. A good test would be to ask "does this phrase have any morphological structure"? I mean, I see a number of verb tenses in the translation; are they actually distinguishable in the original? If yes, then an appendix - explaining the morphology of the phrase - is probably worthwhile. If no, then wikiquote can 'host' this phrase much better than us; because they can include contextual information, wheras we must stick to purely linguistic information. Hyarmendacil (talk) 09:27, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Delete doesn't belong to any language → doesn't belong in the mainspace. Not dictionary-worthy, place it in an appendix if necessary. BigDom (t • c) 19:27, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
To clarify, I support redirecting ("deleting") this because (1) it's a quotation, and Wiktionary is not a repository of quotations (in addition to not being "words", quotations necessarily fail to have multiple independent uses), and (2) it doesn't fit into our dictionary: it can't readily be shown to belong to any particular language. "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" is not SOP; for it to be SOP, it would have to have meaningful parts. - -sche(discuss)08:00, 14 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Delete or Move. Does this actually fulfill the "conveying meaning" requirement of CFI, considering that it conveys meaning only in a made-up language that nobody speaks? —CodeCat21:03, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
But is it being used as English - or as a quotation in Lovecraft-Language? And I certainly don't think the topology textbook refence is any different to my One ring to rule them all - LHC reference above. Scientists always love quoting these kind of books. Hyarmendacil (talk)
Lovecraft-Language. Apparently, the language is called R'lyehan. A few authors have given some of the words meaning by back-formation from the translation. I doubt that you will find any kind of consistent grammar between them though, and Lovecraft appears not to have constructed the phrase (in the way that Tolkien would have done). It is more or less randomly thrown together without any semantic structure. SpinningSpark12:13, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
But those words actually mean something don't they? The only meaning we have for this phrase is the one given to it by Lovecraft, but do people actually use it (in a CFI-compatible way) with that meaning? Like, do people actually say "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" when intending "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming"? —CodeCat16:10, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
It’s a phrase used to praise Cthulhu in Lovecraftian Fiction, just like Sieg Heil is used to praise the Third Reich. It is used in this way in enough citations. The second 2007, the first 2008 and the 2013 citations are particularly damning. — Ungoliant(Falai)16:17, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Delete or Move to an appendix. Any meaning assigned to this can only be assigned to the entirety -- none of the constituent "words" (with the exception of the proper nouns Cthulhu and R'lyeh) has any identifiable meaning. And what of pronunciation? AFAIK this is only ever conveyable in writing.
The fact that this term is so citable in the corpus of English writings that meet WT:CFI suggests that we should include this somewhere. However, the lack of any real meaning, the lack of pronunciation, and the hyper-specificity of this phrase, all strongly suggest that it should go in an appendix, and not in the main space. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig20:20, 20 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
