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Language, of course, has been around as long as there have been people. Rather longer, if your definition of people means just Humans. To be alive is to communicate and any form of communication is a language. People talk (a lot), birds talk, dogs talk, bees talk, slime molds talk, trees talk, bacteria talks, and even probably weird things like viruses talk. Talking is communication. Communication is language. Hell, if you want to push the animist envelope (and I do, I really do), it could be construed that any interaction whatsoever, of anything at all, could be construed as a form of communication. The Universe not only might be, but actually is, talking to you. All the time. All of it. The play does go on and all that.

What does seem to be relatively unique (and in the greater scheme of things, relatively recent) to humans though, is written language - the symbolic representation of language abstracted from the act of immediate communication, a record of thought unmoored from direct context. Written language takes thought and fixes it. Makes it a thing to be seen, or felt, or however one does that, to be internalized later.

The only thing comparable really, is visual art. Music is immediate, dance primal, a recitation, present - they are direct communication, language by any other means. Visual art however is also thing unto itself - a product. A thing to be consumed after the fact, communication reservatus. (Okay, maybe cookies are also comparable...) A representation of the world on a wall in flickering firelight, holding back the dark... Which makes it logical that the first written languages were to all intents and purposes, visual art. Even the quickly abstracted wedges of cuneiform were at heart logograms, pictoral symbols expressing a set concept (and to be fair, usually an accompanying phonetic or syllabic sound). The Sumerian circles and stars, mountain ranges, moons and waves morphing into a series of regular imprints in the hands of the Semitic speaking Akkadians. The two primary examples of logogrammatic writing systems however are of course Chinese charcters and the Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

While Sumerian takes pride of place as the first demonstratable written language (there are some arguments that Chinese does actually predate Sumerian, but the examples are too fragmentary to be conclusive), it is the Egyptian Hieroglyphs that are the next step of our journey. Like everything ancient Egyptian, hieropglyphics are old, written in stone, and totally awesome. It is really hard to beat ancient Egyptian anything for being way over the top, garish, enigmatic, and just really really fucking cool. I mean the Sphinx? The pyramids of Giza? Karnak? C'mon! Whilst trailing Sumeria (at least by most reckoning) a bit in the development of a writing system, the Egyptian took the whole thing a bit further - modeling the flora and fauna and environs of the Nile valley in bright colors and strong distinctive symbols. With a bit over a millenium of development under their belt, by around 2000 BCE ( the start of the Middle Egyptian period) the pictograms were slick, regular and well defined... all 1000 of them or so.

Egypt was a rich and prosperous place, and as such was a center for trade and commerce near and far. As a portal to the sprawling kingdoms of Mesopotamia and points further East, the merchants (and occasionally slaves) of the lands of Canaan, comprising the Levant and the area of Modern Israel, Palestine and a good chunk of Jordan were well represented in the Nile Valley. While Middle Egyptian was in the same overarching Afroasiatic language group as the Canaanites, the differences between Egyptian and the Semitic langiages were great enough that some sort of written communication or translation would be necessary (the various dialects of Canaan on the other hand were extremely similar, basically the same language).

And it was here that something new came out under the Sun...

Egyptians themselves had almost from the start adopted a shorthand cursive system called hieratic for hieroglyphics (the latter being a bit unweildy for anything but usage on monuments), but the sheer number of symbols made it rather prohibitive to learn or easily translatable to anyone not speaking the language as the symbols were still primarilly ideograms or representative of full words or syllables. And it was thus that sometime around 2000 - 1800 BCE or so that the Semitic speaking traders or workers from Canaan adapted a limited set of hieratic symbols in a new way. Instead of each symbol just representing a word or concept, they applied them to a specific sound based on the first consonant (in their own language, not Egyptian) of the given symbol-word. These sound-symbols could then be grouped to represent words as they were spoken. This was really a quite revolutionary concept... one did not need to know what a symbol meant any more - just what it sounded like. In this way words could be built that reflected language directly as it was apprehended rather than symbolically indicating concepts. It was in this uncoupling from from symbolic representation to a more purely abstract phonetic form that the first letters were born.

This first alphabet, usually called Proto-Sinaitic (if found in Sinai or Egypt) or Proto-Canaanite (if found in Canaan) was the ancester to all of the Semitic scripts known - Phoenecian, proto-Hebraic, Aramaic (all incredibly similar) and South Arabian. And these gave rise to nearly every alphabet extant - Arabic, Farsi, Greek, Latin, etc... or at least had a strong influence on nearly every phonetic-based writing systems. (Kanji and its offshoots are not properly alphabets). The power of a phonetic system is independent of the language spoken - Greek is in a completely different language group (Indo-European) than the Afroasiatic Semitic tongues, but uses, in essence, the same alphabet, deriving from the same Proto-Sinaitic source.

Technically Proto-Sinaitic/Cannanite, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi et al. are what are called abjads, a name deriving from the first four letters of Arabic, though in Hebrew (or Greek for that matter) those are all relatively the same. Alif, Baa, Jim, Del; Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth; Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. Abjads are purely consonantal - no vowels at all. Vowels are either omitted in writing or indicated by diacritical marks. Other phonetic formations include abugidas (the name comes from the same four letters in Ethiopic/Ge'ez script) which consist usually of a consonant/vowel pairing, basically a syllable sound which can be modified by diacritics or by changing the shape of the letters, used in writing Ethiopian and a variety of African languages and in general for Indic/Brahmic scripts. Then there is the familiar alphabet (from the first two letters of the Greek) in which vowels are accorded their own, separate letters equal in stature to the consonants. By general Western convention and the fact I am writing in English, the entirety of phonetic systems will be referred to as Alphabets.

The focus here at Baphometrics.com and with The Tree 528 is going to be the Hebrew Alphabet (or the Aleph-bet for you purists (or האלפבית (528) for you extra pure purists)).

For Kabbalists, Hebrew holds a pride of place - in Jewish lore Hebrew was the original language of God. After the fall of the Tower of Babel, Hebrew was the language bequeathed to Abraham and the Children of Israel. Hebrew is the language of Creation itself. In the Sefer Yetzirah, the letters of the Alphabet are used and manipulated, permutated and transformed, each tied to the Universe as a whole, the passage of time and the body of Man. Myriad techniques of literary exegesis were honed and refined in the hands of Ashkenazi Chasidim, each letter revealing its own world of understanding. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet animate the Golem, are written in black fire on white fire, loom large as mountains, and reside in the heart of every speck of being.

In magic, they are called spells for a reason....



The following articles, currently in no particular order are an exploration on the nature of letters, words, sentences, books, alphebets and ciphers and the nature of language itself (or at least, that is the hope...):