Template:ConvertIPA

The notation is there, but it would be best if someone who understands the notation reads it out Jackpot Den 12:49, 30 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

the article is huge, and some people obviously put some time into it, but there's practically speaking NO INFORMATION on what cthuluhu actually DOES, or WILL do, or what the deal is. the ONLY specific piece of information is that he will be "ravenous" in "delight" or something like that. .....what is that supposed to entail? i assume lovecraft's source material gives more details than that. otherwise the whole idea of cthulhu is nothing but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. somebody please put in some details about what cthulhu will actually DO when he rises.

A note, on the removal from the article of the "kuh-loo-oo" pronunciation: As I recall, Cthulhu has been pronounced "kuh-loo-oo", and by no lesser person than Lovecraft himself. Nobody's quite sure how he got "kuh-loo-oo" from "Cthulhu" (or vice versa), though. --Paul A 01:25 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Regarding the quote, "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die," in the story The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft, the protagonist says that the verse refers to the alligator/seal beings that live in the eponymous nameless city in the middle of the desert. "It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:" It might be worth mentioning this, in the section where it says the verse usually relates to Cthulhu. --67.188.65.218 18:55, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Its also worth mentioning that Cthulhu appeared in an episode of the new Justice League cartoon series that runs are Cartoon Network. They pronounced the name "Ich-thoo-loo". He wasn't very Lovecraftian insomuch as Superman punching him in the face did him significant harm, but that's DC for you.

Cthulhu isn't supposed to be very well known; his motives are intended to be obscure, as are his actions. We don't need to know that he 'does' anything. Quoting Shakespeare doesn't change this.

No page on Cthulhu-related satire can be complete without a reference to Tales of the Plush Cthulhu: http://www.logicalcreativity.com/jon/plush/01.html

Cthulhu movie! http://www.cthulhuthemovie.com/

Where should a reference to this go? It's not exactly a parody of Cthulhu...--SarekOfVulcan 07:08, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This article has a bad case of cruft... do we really need to know everytime some webcomic parodied Cthulhu, or cards in games, or (by the gibbering mouths of the squamous shoggoths!) that the description of a minor deviant art community actually mentions the name in an offhanded and totally uninteresting way?

You could probably cut out half of this article just getting rid of pointless trivial crufty junk. DreamGuy 02:26, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In Quake, the first boss is named Cthon, not Cthulhu.

The list of references to the mythos in this article is out of control. There's a page for that. Anyone want to take a stab at criteria by which key references should be selected on this page? -Harmil 22:14, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly, if there's another article on the topic, in my mind there's absolutely no reason for any of them to be on this one. DreamGuy 21:59, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• I split the "References to Cthulhu" section into a separate article: Cthulhu in popular culture. I left a hatnote at the top of the Cthulhu page directing editors to the other article — although technically hatnotes should not be used for this purpose, I strongly recommend leaving it for the time being so that other editors will know where the "fancruft" (with apologies, I would prefer to use a more diplomatic term, but I can't think of one at the moment) went; otherwise, the "References to.." section is liable to get recreated.
  -,-~^R'lyehRising~-,- 19:08, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We have at least two independant accounts of HPL's own pronunciation of Cthulhu:

• Frank Belknap Long said in writing: "Coot-yew-lew"
• Robert Barlow said in writing: "Koot-u-lew"

Those two are clear, convergent, and don't require unreadable IPA to make their point -- IPA should come second after them. Why isn't that information mentionned in the lead, as well as the fact that it was how HPL dealed with the name?

62.147.37.230 06:08, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

IPA is totally useless to being with, despite being inaccurate here. We should use the actual refs. And, from what i remember, HPL himself gave two pronounciations, something like KLOOLOO and something totally alien that humans couldn't understand. It's in his letters somewhere.DreamGuy

I don't know just a thought, and maybe just some conflict here, but in the movie Hellboy at the end of the movie there are those octopus looking monsters that seem to have a similiar appearence to the description of the Cthulhu. I think I'm wrong...but they may very well be the same being. Fromps

In the parody section I changed the note claiming "fthagn" as a corruption of "fan." From the cultist chant "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" ("In the depths of sunken R'lyeh dead Cthulhu sleeps") from Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu," "fthagn" means "sleeps." The preceeding unsigned comment by 165.134.132.52 28 March 2006

• Speaking of "Fthagn", note the following insightful excerpt from Will Murray's essay "Prehuman Language in Lovecraft" (Crypt of Cthulhu 23 [St. John's Eve 1984], Vol. 3 No. 7, pp. 43–47, Robert M. Price (ed.), Bloomfield, NJ: Cryptic Publications):

Obviously the rules of spelling and pronunciation in prehuman speech are not easily deciphered. This is also true of syntax, as is clear from the first and most famous example of the tongue given in "The Call of Cthulhu." This is the line that reads:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

and translates as:

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

Lovecraft informs us that R'lyeh is the undersea palace of the entity Cthulhu. It would seem that "fhtagn" probably means "waits" because the line is compressed to "Cthulhu fhtagn" later in the story. It might possibly mean "Cthulhu dreams" instead, but "fhtagn" is unlikely to mean both "dreams" and "dreaming." We would expect some change in verb-form. In any event, there are nine English words to the phrase, and if we count the apostrophes as word breaks (disregarding the one in R'lyeh, of course) there are nine prehuman words in the original, too. But the arrangement of those words makes generating a grammatical structure—and thus translating the rest of the words—virtually impossible. No syntactical arrangement in which R'lyeh wgah'nagl separates the subject-verb combination "Cthulhu waits" works.

Hence, it may be impossible for human beings to deduce the true meaning of the word—though the meaning may be perfectly clear to the non-human minds of the Old Ones (and this may be what Lovecraft intended).
,-~^R'lyehRising~-, 03:29, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the following unsourced material from the article (alleged pronunciations for "Cthulhu"):

/kəˈθuːluː/, /kəˈθʊːluː/, or /kəˈtʰʊːluː/ (IPA transliteration);

-,-~^R'lyehRising~-,- 02:16, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I readded it. If this article is going to list possible pronounciations, the IPA should be used. --Krsont 22:26, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

http://churchofcthulhu.templeofdagon.com

The article says that "[u]nlike other human religions, the cult of Cthulhu seeks no reward for serving their "god" such as eternal paradise after death. They serve only to bring the Great Clearing Off and will no doubt be served the same fate as the rest of Earth's denizens." This seems to mesh poorly with this sentence from Call of Cthulhu, from old Castro's account of the cult to Inspector Legrasse:

"Then the Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

(Towards the end of part II, a page or so before the "That is not dead ..." couplet is quoted. p155 in the Penguin Classics paperback collection "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.)

The "they" apparently refers to "all men" in the previous sentence, describing how humanity at the time of the Old Ones' return will have become a race of Nietzschean superhumans. So while the cultists apparently expect no paradisical afterlife from Cthulhu, they do hope to help bring about a kind of golden age for mankind under the Old Ones' rule.

That one might reasonably suspect they'd be disappointed should they ever succeed is another issue.

I don't think they'd be dissapointed. We'd probably be able to expect one last huge mass party/orgy brought on by the madness of Cthulhu's rising before the whole being eaten thing :p. --Krsont 10:47, 25 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why do we still need the ipa-cleanup tag? The issue of whether IPA is useful aside, it looks like the cleanup has already been done. ManaUser 15:52, 20 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

is Cthulu really "arguably one of the least terrible creatures in the pantheon"? I mean, he is the most famous one amongst non-readers of Lovecraft, so doesn't that mean he has had the most terrifying impact on those who heard of him? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 217.208.107.41 (talk • contribs) 03:44, 2006 June 21 (UTC)

There's an awful lot of OR in this article--taking vague statements in fictional stories and trying to analyze them as if they referred to an actual entity. It needs a serious prune. Nareek 11:19, 25 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(Discussion moved here from my talkpage —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 21:11, 22 July 2006 (UTC))[reply]

Had a question, thought you might be able to help out. You recently removed the Dunwich Horror painting from Cthulu, I tried reinserting it with some extra text to pass the fair use test. [1] Would you mind checking, and if I erred, remove the offending image? Thanks. See ya. --LV ^{(Dark Mark)} 20:49, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I was just working on researching that, in fact. It feels wrong to me, since this painting almost certainly didn't accompany the story in its original form (pulp horror magazines, I think) but at some point was maybe commisioned or licensed for use in a specific book reprinting the Dunwich Horror, and other stories. I didn't get anybody else to weigh in at WP:FUR when I asked about whether this picture had legitimate fair use *anywhere* though. But I'd like to find some more precise dates at least. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 20:56, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I find no mention of the painting anywhere but that it is the artwork on the front flyleaf cover of Arkham house's 1984 issuing of The Dunwich Horror and Others. The Dunwich Horror having been published (in Weird Tales) in 1929, I don't think a case can be made that using this artwork alongside a discussion of the short story is fair-use. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 21:10, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The dates have nothing to do with whether the image is Fair Use or not. We're using an image that's designed to promote Cthulhu commercially for purposes of educational commentary about Cthulhu--it's a classic example of Fair Use. Nareek 11:09, 25 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. The image wasn't "designed to promote Cthulu commercially". There's no Cthulu marketing team selling Cthulu merchandise and using that painting as part of its marketing collateral. The image was designed, if anything, to promote the 1984 issuing of Arkham House's The Dunwich Horror and Others commercially. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 15:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is an Arkham House that claims (probably falsely) to own the copyright to "Call of Cthulhu", in which Cthulhu is a character, and markets a collection of stories that includes "Call of Cthulhu" by including an artist's conception of Cthulhu on the cover. How this is different from using the cover of a Peanuts collection to illustrate an article about Snoopy, I don't know. Nareek 23:35, 8 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The version that's just gone up has the one big advantage of being sourced--mainly to Lovecraft himself, who would seem to be the key source of information about his creation. The article now contains just about everything Lovecraft's fiction tells us about Cthulhu.

Hopefully the article can go on from there to explain how other major writers have expanded or altered the concept of Cthulhu, also referring to their published work. Nareek 05:16, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]