Mythos without the þorn

Talking about H P Lovecraft last time reminded me of a pet gripe. I have quite a few of those, if we're being honest, but this one is about the proper way to pronounce Cthulhu. To begin with, here's HPL's take, as given to Duane Rimel in a letter dated 23 July 1934:

"The word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. [...] The letters CTHULHU were merely what Prof. Angell hastily devised to represent (roughly and imperfectly, of course) the dream-name orally mouthed to him by the young artist Wilcox. The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlul'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered—the l sound being unrepresented [in Angell's rendition of the word]. My rather careful devising of this name was a sort of protest against the silly and childish habit of most weird and science-fiction writers, of having utterly non-human entities use a nomenclature of thoroughly human character; as if alien-organed beings could possibly have languages based on human vocal organs. Actually, every name supposed to have been originated by non-humans should be painstakingly shaped in such a way as not to conform to the principles of human vocalism and language."

Clear? HPL gave a simpler account in a letter to Willis Conover dated 29 August 1936:

"Of course it is not a human name at all-having never been designed for enunciation by the vocal apparatus of Homo sapiens. The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly-formed syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth. That is, if one is a human being. Directions for other entities are naturally different."

The confusion seems to have arisen because sloppy readers (and Wikipedia editors) have assumed Lovecraft was aiming for the suggestion of chthonian. Cthulhu is the very opposite of a chthonic entity, having come from the stars and been buried under the sea. If Lovecraft had meant the C to be pronounced as in the common but mistaken version "kuh-THUL-oo" he'd have written it Ch.

We can isolate the syllables as (Ct)(hul)(hu) rather than as the popular assumption of (C)(thul)(hu). It's more accurate to think of the sound that Prof Angell wrote as ct to be the consonant at the end of of a word like "act". Try isolating that, removing the a sound, and you have a sort of bitten-back consonant that could sound like a gulped k.

Now take the next element, rendered by Prof Angell as hul. With the gulped k followed by hul (vowel sound as in "full") and followed by hloo (mistakenly written by Angell as "hu") then we have something nearer to what Lovecraft imagined -- with the same proviso he applied, namely that our mouths and throats and the atmosphere we breathe are all wrong for making any such sound.

That said, Cthulhu cultists would have as much knowledge of the accurate pronunciation of their deity's name as any 1920s Christian or Muslim (etc) could have of the Big Bang. And Cthulhu probably knows and cares nothing for what its cultists think. So player-characters can pronounce it however they like, and argue it out with the big lug when it finally rises from the deep.