Romanizing Cthulhu 3: Breakthrough

• Part 1
• Part 2 

Back on this again, but now with something to actually show for it. Dump the previous two posts out the window, I've cooked up an actual, functional, etymology for the ol’ squid head. This is extremely silly on paper, but brings with it some potentially interesting lore threads or complications if you want to shake up the Mythos in your own games or stories. 

This will ignore everything in the HPL letter cited in Part 1: he wasn't concerned with this shit and so there's an inescapable disconnect between the intended pronunciation, intended narrative role, and actual execution that would undermine the entire exercise (see: the last two posts)

Core Assumption A: The similarities between “Cthulhu” and “chthonic” are etymological, rather than coincidental. “Cthonic” is a viable alternate spelling of the latter, which gives us our <cth>.

Core Assumption B: The Necronomicon’s chain of translation is as described in History of the Necronomicon: Arabic > Greek > Latin > English

Divergence 1: While John Dee still never completed his Latin > English translation of the Necronomicon in my version of events, he incorporated some elements of it (such as the name Cthulhu) in his other occult writings and from there those elements dispersed into modern esotericism.

Now to get rolling, chthonic is the adjectival version of Greek khthṓn (χθών), which generally means earth, soil, ground, country, world, etc. This comes from Proto-Hellenic *kʰtʰṓn, which in turn comes from the very well-attested Proto-Indo-European *dʰéǵʰōm, which is generally considered to be the unattested / undefined-but-probably-just-means-earth root *dʰéǵʰ- plus a neuter noun ending *-om

There’s step one: *dʰéǵʰ- "earth, soil, ground"

But, in order to get that onset cluster we need to shift this to 0-grade instead of e-grade (don’t ask what this means, think of it as linguistics THAC0). There are a couple ways to do this, but I’m going to use the less common option of compounding two roots together to make a new root. The second root is going to need an *ow as its nucleus so we can get -ou- in Greek and -u- in Latin, and it can’t end in *-l because PIE roots can’t end in two resonants (m, n, l, r, y, w) in a row. Since it doesn’t have a leading consonant, that means it’ll start with a laryngeal, so our only actual options are *h₁ew-, *h₂ew-, *h₃ew-, and *Hew-. We’ve got a *h₁ewH-, meaning “to help; to protect”, which is fine, but *h₂ew- gets us the one-two punch of “to enjoy; to consume” (it’s the ultimate origin of “avarice”, and a good deal of other words involving desire, greed, or hunger).

Well if that ain’t a bit of spooky synchronicity.

Combining the two we end up with a new root of *dʰǵʰh₂ew-, which if we’re going by its literal components is “to earth-eat”; I’ll pencil it in as “to cause widespread destruction / catastrophe; to perform act-of-the-gods levels of ‘fuck this place in particular’.”

To this we’re going to add a root extension of *-l.  Root extensions are consonants that got glommed onto the ending of roots at some point but elicited no apparent change in meaning. This is technically not cheating, in the way that the rules technically do not ban dogs from playing basketball.

Final root form: *dʰǵʰh₂éwl- 

Last thing we need is an ending, which is going to be a two-step.

First step, we’ll add the ending *-os. This is not very unusual, as it seems that approximately 310% of PIE words end in *-os, in the same way as how about a gorillion words are related to either shining or swelling. But we’re specifically using the thematic o-grade *-os, which turns a verb into a noun meaning “the action or result of doing that verb”. 

PIE penultimate form: *dʰǵʰh₂ówlos - "the action of earth-eating"

Step two is shifting the accent to the final syllable, which will form an agentive meaning by way of a genitive construction: “of earth-eating” => “earth-eater”.

PIE full form: *Dʰǵʰh₂owlós - “earth-eater”

Then we run it through the sound changes and transcription

• Proto-Hellenic A: *Tʰkʰoulós
• Proto-Hellenic B: *Kʰtʰoulós
• Ancient Greek: (As above) 
• Latin: Chthūlus
• English A: Chthulu
• English B: Cthulhu

Wham bam thank you ma'am. 

Three more things before I finish up, all of which can lead into surprisingly deep wells of inspiration.

First off; this PIE form means that you can convert *Dʰǵʰh₂owlós into any Indo-European language you want with a bit of elbow grease - I shouldn’t have to tell you how extremely useful that is if you want to establish global scope. And if you deal in loanwords, it could spread to different language families!

Secondly, you might have noticed by now that there’s a conspicuous gap in the chain of transmission: If Cthulhu can be traced all the way back to PIE through Greek, that skips Arabic entirely. Did al-Hazra use a Greek name to begin with (and if he did, why?) Did the Byzantine translators scrub the original names out of the text and replace them with their own? Did al-Hazra even mention Cthulhu at all, or was he a later addition to the text? 

And perhaps most concerning of all: if you use this etymology, it would mean that a bunch of nomadic horse-warriors  (most-accepted hypothesis of now is that the Yamnaya culture were the core speakers of PIE) on the Pontic Caspian Steppe knew about Cthulhu. 

(Oh, would you look at that, a couple of hyperlinks to The Chronicle of the Daevas and The True Empire just fell off the back of a truck right in the middle of this post. I’m certain they contain absolutely no relevant inspirational material whatsoever.)

Bonus fourth fun fact; the Yamnaya culture co-existed with (and also potentially had a hand in destroying) the neighboring Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, who are part of the burned house horizon. Every 70-80 years the Cucuteni-Trypillia would not just burn their settlements to the ground and relocate, they’d burn them with such intensity that the wattle-and-daub would vitrify like clay in a kiln. They burnt their houses so completely that archaeologists are still not entirely sure how they did it.

Food for thought. 

E: u/YuunofYork brought up some significant critiques when I posted this on reddit, which I've linked to here.