Enochian as a Language

Rather than diving hard into the technicalities of the language, I'll try to approach this from the perspective of someone who is entertaining curiosity and mystery. I believe doing so will bring forth a lot of linguistic factors on its own without me needing to treat this like a technical manual about Enochian's syntactical and phonetic workings.

The Language's Name

As mentioned in other entries in the #plain-speak section, Enochiana has its own language: Enochian. At least, that's what I call it—some authors insist on calling it Angelic or Adamical and, in support of their claims, John Dee himself never called the language "Enochian".

However, I will continue calling it "Enochian" because that seems to be what the Internet has decided its name is.

Sources of the Language

This one is important: we have two main sources of Enochian—but really, only one of them counts: the 48 Keys (really just nineteen invocations) and Liber Loagaeth. Of the two, the 48 Keys is genuinely valuable, whereas Liber Loagaeth is not exactly helpful and ought be regarded as its own separate thing.

The 48 Keys come with accompanying translation, word-by-word. There are a few ambiguities or inconsistencies across manuscripts, but for the most part it is a coherent whole. However, the 48 Keys are only 1,090 words—not unique words, simply the total—making it a tiny corpus.

There are two primary reasons I do not count Liber Loagaeth as a source of the language:

Liber Loagaeth is mostly untranslated. Dee has a few notes here and there with accompanying translations, the meaning of some words can be inferred based on the words in the 48 Keys, but it remains alphabet soup for the most part.
Speaking of alphabet soup, if you've familiarized yourself with the 48 Keys sufficiently, you'll likely come to the same conclusion I have: the language in Liber Loagaeth has a slightly different flavor in its letter-patterns than the 48 Keys. Best case scenario, it is a dialect; medium case scenario is parts of it are encoded; worst case scenario is that it is just nonsense pretending to be meaningful.

There are also uses of Enochian in Dee's diaries, but they are few and far between—and many times do not come with any accompanying translation. For this reason, this entry concerns itself with the language used for the 48 Keys.

Was the Enochian Language Channeled?

If the diaries are to be believed, the Enochian language—and really all we have of Enochiana—was channeled. It's also possible that Dee and Kelly invented it. So... was it received from otherworldly intelligences?

There are two possibilities:

To be honest, I go both ways depending on the day and my mood—but it really doesn't matter much to me because my interest in Enochiana is in making sense of the material, not its origins.

However, I think it's interesting to go over some of the arguments—sometimes it's fun to entertain the "but what if??" thoughts because it makes some of the internal coherence of Enochiana all the more interesting.

Reasons to Doubt

First of all, according to Dee (and the angels via Kelly), Enochian was the language God spoke to Adam in the garden of Eden—and also the common language of humanity prior to the Tower of Babyl falling. Of all the possible ways people can speak, it seems odd to me that the language the first of man spoke contains the same sounds English does.

Consider possible qualities Enochian could have but does not:

No tonal qualities to differentiate words, like in Chinese
No grammar markers, like in Japanese
No non-English sounds, like the Arabic "Q"
- Additionally, uncommon English sounds like "th"
No gender markers, like in Romance languages and many others
Sentence structure is predominantly subject-verb-object (e.g., I eat pizza)

Additionally, Hebrew was to be regarded as an imperfect form of Enochian. Why, then, does Enochian bear so much more resemblance to English than to Hebrew? Consider the way words can be combined:

In English, sub (under) + marine (sea) = submarine (the boat-like vehicle that lets you travel underwater)
In Enochian:
- CRP (but) + L (one) = CRPL (but one)
- ZIR (I am) + ENAY (the Lord) + IAD (God¹)
- A (in, with) + I (is) = AAI (amongst, or literally: is within)
- GMICALZO (power and presence) + OMA (understanding) = GMICALZOMA (power of understanding)

In Hebrew, if my rudimentary understanding is right, you don't do this. Most combined words in this fashion, as portmanteaus, are recent and often non-standard.

Let's also consider a few words that are suspiciously close to English or real-world words in one way or another.

LONDOH, which means "kingdom"—close to London, the capitol Dee cared for
MADRID, which means "iniquities"—capitol of Spain, an enemy of Britain at the time
BABALOND, which means "a harlot"—clearly related to Babylon
LUCIFTIAN, which means "brightness"—a reference to Lucifer
This one is a two-parter; bear with me:
- NA is an alternative spelling of ENAY—why? Because the letters "N" and "A", when pronounced, match the pronouncing of the spelled out version of the word
- If the above holds true, EMNA is the spelling of the word "here". Pronounced /em-nah/ it's nothing special, but pronounced /em-en-ay/, it starts sounding like the beginning of "emanation"

Furthermore, let's consider the person who relayed all of the information to John Dee—Edward Kelly was not trustworthy (convicted forger, criminal, ears cut off as punishment—those sorts of things). It is entirely possible that Kelly had ulterior motives concerning Dee, and there are instances of Dee using languages Kelly did not know to keep things from him.

It's also possible that John Dee and Edward Kelly conspired together—they could have sat in Dee's library concocting the language together. The entirety of the spirit communications could have been fabricated. It's simply not possible for us to know.

Reasons to Suspend Disbelief

If Enochiana was genuinely channeled, that's incredible. For instance:

It is not wholly random as channeled languages usually are;
which is to say, there is a lot of internal consistency within the 48 Keys
There is also a lot that fits just-so with the rest of the system
- Symmetrical figures, received before the Great Table fitting perfectly nigh-perfectly into the Great Table? Baffling

While Kelly may not have been trustworthy, Dee was trustworthy (at least relatively—he was a spy after all). We know what Dee wrote versus what Kelly wrote because we have samples of both of their handwriting. Dee was also incredibly thorough and wrote down and documented everything—including even arguments with his wife.

As best as I can reconstruct it, Dee's motivation for the spirit communications held vaguely Protestant sensibilities of trying to get at the source. Given the back-and-forth from Catholicism to Protestantism and the smaller sects of Christianity present throughout Britain at the time, getting to the root of Christian faith through direct interaction—when such an act is considered a viable option—only makes sense if you want answers.

Consequences of (dis)believing

There are none but your own; do as you will.

Also, just to reiterate: what I care about is the whole of this from a digital humanities perspective, from a computational linguistics perspective, from a this-has-been-fun-to-work-on-in-my-spare-time perspective. So there.

¹ IAD is an incredibly loosely defined word in Enochian; it is more like cosmic righteousness/justice/alignment-with-divinity than God, but those things are also implied to equate to God. I might talk about that another time.

The Language Itself

With that all said, I believe I have given a bit of incidental exposure to the language. Let's take a deeper look. First: the alphabet.

The Alphabet

Ignore the pronunciation guide included in the image; I lifted the image from Wikipedia because it's free for use and chose not to edit out the suggested pronunciations. The main reason I wanted to share the alphabet is because it has a distinctive look and there isn't much like it; the closest relative it has is different kinds of shorthands and ciphers, but even then it's distant.

As it stands, the alphabet doesn't see a lot of use outside of the occult and media. Almost all of the Enochian Dee and Kelly transcribed used English lettering, so this is more a fun feature than anything else.

The Spelling

Enochian is possibly one of the most consistently inconsistent (constructed) languages I've ever encountered—especially when it comes to spelling. Imagine, if you will: the English of Dee's time was highly irregular; spelling was an option (Dee spells the same word multiple ways, multiple times, within the 48 Keys).

If spelling was an option for English, I can only imagine how much more of an option it was for a channeled language.

Part of the reason was because Dee was recording sometimes sounds, sometimes letters. For instance, there are parts where Dee records a word like MALPRG but PURGEL is also a valid expression of the root for fire, PRG. This goes for many, many words.

Pronunciation

So if the words are spelled sometimes to help with pronunciation and sometimes to... not... what is one to do?

My best recommendation: pronounce the word like English, but with "old" vowel sounds (admittedly, this last part is personal preference).

Vowels

A: Can be pronounced as /ɑ/ (as in "father") or /æ/ (as in "cat")
E: Typically pronounced as /ɛ/ (as in "bet") or /eɪ/ (as in "they")
I: Pronounced as /i/ (as in "machine") or /ɪ/ (as in "sit")
O: Can be pronounced as /oʊ/ (as in "go") or /ɔ/ (as in "thought")
U: Usually pronounced as /u/ (as in "blue") or /ʌ/ (as in "cup") or, sometimes, treat it as the consonant V instead
Y: Often pronounced as /ɪ/ (as in "myth") or /aɪ/ (as in "my")

Consonants

B: Pronounced as /b/ (as in "bat")
C: Pronounced as /k/ (as in "cat") or /s/ (as in "cent"), depending on context
D: Pronounced as /d/ (as in "dog")
F: Pronounced as /f/ (as in "fish")
G: Typically pronounced as /g/ (as in "go"), but can also be /dʒ/ (as in "gem") in certain contexts
H: Pronounced as /h/ (as in "hat")
K: Pronounced as /k/ (as in "kite")
L: Pronounced as /l/ (as in "lamp")
M: Pronounced as /m/ (as in "man")
N: Pronounced as /n/ (as in "net")
P: Pronounced as /p/ (as in "pen")
R: Pronounced as /r/ (as in "red")
S: Pronounced as /s/ (as in "sun") or /z/ (as in "rose"), depending on context
T: Pronounced as /t/ (as in "top")
V: Pronounced as /v/ (as in "victory") or, sometimes, treat it as the vowel U instead
X: Pronounced as /ks/ (as in "box")
Z: Pronounced as /z/ (as in "zebra")

morphology

Just to be clear: some verbs are conjugated, others not, but the conjugation is impossible to make sense of because it is not consistent from verb to verb, and the corpus is so small that there simply are not enough instances of words to really reconstruct what the morphology genuinely is.

Or at least, it normally wouldn't be—that's where my project comes in.

As I have in the project description on github: "Because why not look at glossolalia with a fresh set of AIs? 🥸"