/φī-wer-jōnos/

[haptalaon]

For the longest time, I have intended my work to have a Language - for the deep and secret mystic reason that a Magical Language makes your spells better because you feel cool and spooky.

For 'lets move away from the appropriation of Kabbalah in ceremonial magic' reasons, poorly-translated Hebrew is out; and Latin has been done - i know it but it brings a certain kind of brassy light or black mass energy which is only right now and then. Old English (a.k.a. 'Anglo Saxon') I love, big rumbly earthtones, but brings too much political baggage; contemporary Celtic languages - gaelic, welsh, etc - perpetuate a romanticism that contemporary language revivalists likely won't appreciate. My friends advised against Tolkien languages.

That rules out pretty much everything, but I keep finding myself drawn to Proto-Celtic - or possibly Proto-Indo-European. Neither language was ever spoken. They've been reconstructed by linguistic archaeologists. Languages shift over time, and if we understand how, we can look backwards in time.

Landweird.

An example of how this works from wikipedia:

In Gaulish and the Brittonic languages, the Proto-Indo-European *kʷ phoneme becomes a new *p sound. Thus, Gaulish petuar[ios], Welsh pedwar "four", but Old Irish cethair and Latin quattuor

The oldest language spoken in Britain, according to the internet, is a form of Celtic known as Brythonic (a.k.a. Brittonic, nowadays the preferred academic term, but the romantic folklorist who termed it Brythonic knew what he was doing; why even be a linguist if you cannot select words for their beauty and mystery. Brythonic it is.) But tread your way backwards and carefully, back down the tree past where the branches meet, and you will find the words that might have come before. Further back from that - the first, imagined Celtic - is Indo-European, the first-imagined language uniting language-families across the world, back into the darkness of deep forgetting.

I do not especially like Proto-Celtic. Unlike Old English, which makes me excited to speak, Proto-Celtic is a mix of overfamiliar and ugly. I find the tantalising names of gods-of-a-single-stone - Artaios, Belenos, Ricagambeda, Moritsagus - mighty. But my dabbling in dictionaries turns up nothing as powerful - perhaps because it's a language I don't know how to use

The word for 'land' is /φī-wer-jōnos/, but I am learning to love it. ɸ is a voiceless bilabial fricative - not like 'f', pronounced with the tongue-and-the-teeth - but a horse-huff of an 'f' as in 'pfffft!'. You have to say it out loud to get it, and while speaking pay attention to what the parts of your mouth are doing. It's soft like 'ph' - like breathing. Something meditative and strange about the struggle to make sounds new yet ancient

phferi-phfīwerianos - landbeyond - andīmiketo - bewilderment - brīwotelamon - earthfragment - morikommanos - seamemory - tanātanawo - thintime - leinesweida - the softplaces - dīglennelugrākandom - moonlightgatherer - mauknibargoses - bookbog - tuxslobrend - hollowhill - koudot - the hidden sound - mori-brano-rūnom - secretdiver - brixtās-uφo-dātū - spells in the sediment

This is not a history lesson; their service is as sound, and the sense of wonder that is speaking with a dead tongue in your living throat

Comments

[goatgodschild]

For me, my work is more related to music than language, usually music from poetry. Parts of work, or particular moods, seem tied to songs, or the songs *are* them. A cappella or choir singing is separate enough from ordinary speech for me, with its humming pronunciation, dropped or added letters, and odd stresses.

Folk singing (of which I am primarily familiar with filk) is similar, although it tends to rely on guitar, an instrument I cannot play, and often keeps the stresses in from ordinary speech.

EX: In "Gently Johnny", the choir pronunciation is Ghaentlay, which to my extremely American ear is smoothing out an ordinary word into a warm caressing sound.

There's something tied to the Landweird specifically in this, I think. Both in use of the 1960's-1970's folk music scene, and the broad repurposing of "standard" poets, particularly British ones, into showing their true power and horror.

[haptalaon]

ahhhh i love this! Yes.

I went to a magic conference recently and one speaker said his groups always made up new words to current popular songs to work with. It's such an obvious idea that I should have thought of it sooner - starting with a tune or sound that speaks to you, but bringing in new words.

The woman who organised it also discussed the occult tradition of like, 'vibrating' words in ritual ('this is the door of the south!') and said she found it more powerful to just sing them out. She's a big woman with lungs of an opera singer and she demonstrated and yeah, yeah. One thing I've liked about going on T (bit problematic!) is my voice is now more chesty, deep, rich, resonant and powerful - and my singing has improved - so that sense of magical vibration is far more real.

I'm trying to get away from Kabbalah obvs, but i recently read the Sepher Yetzirah (its primary text) and I absolutely adored a section about magical phonology, not just that these are magical words or words with magical meanings, but this book from like the 3rd century is discussing how the underlying order of the system is structured, in part, by the phonemes of Hebrew. It's gorgeous.

The underlying key to any kind of magical language stuff must be phonemes and sonics and really getting into sound-production (whether that's thinking about human sound production, or frequencies and machinery). As you say, remembering that the song or sound IS the magic, rather than just expressing or describing it.

Have you read The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood? That is focused on sound and singing, very creepy.

Apparently, Freddie Mercury wrote Crazy Little Thing Called Love because he couldn't play the guitar - it was a design challenge for him, to see if he could make something out of the very basic chords and skills he had.

The Wicker Man songs read as quite 'standard' English to me (odd, for a story set in Scotland, but then the politics of the film seems to be a Lot about how few of the people on the little Scottish island are or sound Scottish), but it's a common thing in folk songs to be only singable with the accent of its author, and so it sort of keeps their voice within it. I love that.

[raynedanser]

That's really neat... I love stuff like this. I would probably venture toward Welsh, since I already speak a smattering of it anyway. It's interesting how close to the gaul it is (or at least pedwar!).

[haptalaon]

I am learning Welsh since moving to Wales - there's an active and quite courageous language revival movement.

I know someone whose dad was on a language protest in the 1970s - both his arms were broken by a politician driving a car at him. When her dad was taken to trial, he refused to speak or answer because the questions were in English - he insisted on the right to be tried in the Welsh language. Some groups would even blow up (empty) buildings in protest, or steal road signs if they only had English on. You'll still see stickers reading 'Ble mae'r cymraeg?' placed on road signs - i.e. 'Where's the Welsh?' - if they only have the English place name.

Because that's my lived context, I try and be more conscious of the politics of the language than one might otherwise need to be; and the worry is that using it spiritually implies it is a dead language, or a mystical magic language - somewhat akin to the concerns indigenous Americans have about their language/practies being used as a kind of Magical, Fantasy, Imaginary instead of real people with real problems. I try to think of Welsh as the language of my neighbours, not my gods.

(but the relationship here is complicated! Part of the Welsh culture revival movement included Welsh people who *loved* the idea of being magical druids from an ancient eerie culture of fae-folk and wandering bards, and so co-created celtic romanticism with English people who liked projecting that onto the Welsh. Iolo Morganwg was known for making up poems and practices and pretending they were ancient; Arthur Machen, later author, was Welsh writes romanticised tales of the holy grail being hidden here and old folk with tales to tell. & fundamentally, I think it's ok to be excited about the romance and mystery of the history and culture of the place you live.)

At the same time, I do think putting some of my work into Welsh would be appropriate - and a useful goal to be practicing the language as well. It's the language of the local spirits, one would assume, after all!

[raynedanser]

I have a book of Iolo Morganwg's poetry, I believe, translated of course. :) I've studied a bit of Druidry as well, with OBOD and Isle of Wight Druids. :) I think doing some work in Welsh would be wonderful.

[haptalaon]

What is OBOD like? My husband keeps wanting to do their course as a precursor to becoming a pagan wedding officiant, but i'm uncomfy with the paying-for-magical-knowledge model

[raynedanser]

That's why I discontinued it. It was good, very in depth, really went into the Awen, and Iolo and his poetry, Cerridwen, etc. But It left a bad taste in my mouth that I had to pay for it (and in American $$, the conversion wasn't cheap!). Isle of Wight druids IS free and still in depth, but they have sessions and the next isn't for a while, I think.