ʾÅa̩en

Background

At the beginning of the creation of the physical universe, God used speech to bring all things into being (Genesis 2:19), but there is some debate as to whether this was the same language that God used when speaking with Adam and his first creations, or even if it was used to communicate to, between, and among the Celestials. Jewish authorities maintain that the Hebrew language was the language of God while the sacred language in Islam is classical Arabic, a descendant of the proto-Semitic language along with Hebrew and Aramaic. In Vedic traditions, Vedic Sanskrit, the language of liturgy, was considered the language of the gods. Coptic, the Greek derived replacement for the lost Hieroglyphics in Egypt is also still used in religious liturgical services. In his 1510 work De Occulta Philosophia, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa writes:

We might doubt whether Angels, or Demons, since they be pure spirits, use any vocal speech, or tongue amongst themselves, or to us; but that Paul in some place saith, If I speak with the tongue of men, or angels: but what their speech or tongue is, is much doubted by many. For many think that if they use any Idiome, it is Hebrew, because that was the first of all, and came from heaven, and was before the confusion of languages in Babylon, in which the Law was given by God the Father, and the Gospell was preached by Christ the Son, and so many Oracles were given to the Prophets by the Holy Ghost: and seeing all tongues have, and do undergo various mutations, and corruptions, this alone doth alwaies continue inviolated.

But later Agrippa further writes:

But because the letters of every tongue, as we shewed in the first book, have in their number, order, and figure a Celestiall and Divine originall, I shall easily grant this calculation concerning the names of spirits to be made not only by Hebrew letters, but also by Chaldean, and Arabick, Ægyptian, Greek, Latine, and any other...

Later in the 16th century, the Elizabethan mathematician and scholar John Dee and alchemist Edward Kelley claimed to have received a “Celestial Speech” directly from the angels. This was recorded in Dee's journals published as The Five Books of the Mysteries along with a complete text called the Book of Loagaeth. In these works, it was claimed that Angelical (the name Dee referred to in his journals) was the language God used to create the world, then later used by Adam to speak with God and the Heavenly Host, as well as being used to name all things in existence. Upon Adam's fall from grace and expulsion from Eden, he lost the ability to speak this language and constructed a form of proto-Hebrew based upon his vague recollection of Angelical. This proto-Hebrew was the universal human language used until the time of the Confusion of Tongues a the Tower of Babel. Technically speaking, the ʾÅa̩en Gohuȋlim (AG) can, in most practical ways, be seen as the progenitor tongue of all the Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, as well as the Hamitic languages, Egyptian, Akkadian, and Phoenician. Put another way, it is the proto language of proto-Semitic, which itself can only be hypothetically reconstructed from available archaeological and linguistic data. More to the point, it shares more similarity with the proto-Semitic language, or more correctly, with early forms of Akkadian and Eblaite of the Afro-Asiatic macro-family of languages as well as Aramaic, although many sounds, morphological rules, and syntactic structurings have been lost or otherwise corrupted in those languages. However, a student of these ancient languages will find many similarities among them.

Phonology

According to Arabic grammarians of authority, a sentence is “an intelligible group of words after which silence seems good.” From this vantage point of grammar, the constituent elements in the sentence are words disposed to express subject, object, predicate, etc. From the point of view of morphology, each word contains a root, and in most cases also a formative element, including inflections, affixes, suffixes, etc. Phonology regards the same sentence as its subject matter, but treats it as a series of syllables which is continuous from the point at which the sentence begins after a greater or lesser interval of silence, until the point at which speech again tends toward a stop. The components of language, speech in particular here, lies between two intervals of silence and forms a phonetic unity we call a sentence. And while the phonetic unit is considered the syllable, the syllable is a part of a continuous speech lying between two intervals of silence. It is possible for a single syllable to form a complete phonetic group which may or may not be a sentence, like when using the imperative, but more likely, and specifically in the ʾÅa̩en, single syllables are used as nuclei and scaffolding upon which to compose your dialog.

The sound system of ʾÅa̩en Gohuȋlim is as follows:

Consonants

In the Semitic and Hamitic language families, all syllables must begin with a consonant, which may be in the same word as the vowel, or may be the final consonant of a preceding word. If a syllable begins with a vowel, it must be commenced with the voiceless palatal fricative of the emphatic pronounced as /ç / (see the previous section on transliteration notes for how this is marked). Doing so essentially converts the vowel into a consonant for all practical purposes. This behavior can still be found in modern Hebrew and Arabic and is called a hamzah الهَمْزة in Arabic and is used in Arabic to designate a glottal stop. That is, a short pause of sound produced by obstructing air flow using the larynx and soft palate. In Hebrew it is the letter aleph א, and in the Syriac alphabet it is used in word-initial position to mark a word beginning with a vowel, although sometimes in practice it is elided. Poetically, one can say the hamzah is the sound of silence. Which letter is to be used to support the hamzah depends on the quality of the adjacent vowels. In Greek, spiritus lenis “smooth breathing” represents this notion and is a diacritical mark used in polytonic orthography and in the ancient days of Greek history, it marked the absense of the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ from the beginning of a word.

So, it remains that a syllable is composed of two elements: an initial consonant, and a following vowel. Therefore, syllables must start with a consonant followed by a vowel. A consonant may not follow another consonant unless forming a word where the previous word ends in a vowel, allowing a consonant to be added for closure, in which case, it may be necessary to prefix the word with a prosthetic vowel. More on this in the vowels section.

The initial divine language consisted of 35 consonantal phonemes, 5 more than proto-Semitic and 6 more than Arabic, whose phonology and morphology is extremely conservative, as languages go. As is found in the proto-Semitic language family, the consonant system is based on triads of related voiced, voiceless, and emphatic consonants. ʾÅa̩en is triconsonantal, or triliteral, meaning the roots of verbs and many nouns are characterized as a sequence of consonants, or radicals. These abstract roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding vowels following the particular morphological category around the root consonants and with appropriate patterns. It is worth noting that biliterals and even quadriliteral roots do exist.

Biconsonantal Roots

By far, the most common roots in ʾÅa̩en are tri-radical, but some of these triconsonantal roots were originally bi-radical and the transformation from biliteral to triliteral usually follows a pattern of causation i.e. ġ-h-l → ġohuilen “language, to lift up” from ġ-l “to speak; it is said.”

Group 1A Two Consonant Roots Two consonant noun stems which show no assimilation to three consonant stems. These include words like dm 'blood' and mw 'water.'

Group 1B Two Consonant Roots Noun stems which show two consonants but are frequently treated as having three. This may be an assimilation by early pre-Mosaic lineage man to tri-consonantal forms that were easier to mouth and pronounce, or it may be that they were originally tri-consonantal themselves. Words like ʾm → ummu 'mother' and ʾb → abba 'father' are common.

Quadriliteral Roots

A quadriliteral is a consonantal root containing a sequence of four consonants used to derive the appropriate quadriliteral word form. It is believed that quad-radical roots came about from the agglutination of biliteral roots, although the evidence is lacking since its inception was at the dawn of creation itself. Many quadriliteral roots have special significance.

The four triads making up the dental and alveolar plosives and fricatives are known to be in use in its construction, shown below the consonant table that follows. Phonemes in a dotted-blue box are voiced variants.

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Epiglottal	Glottal
Nasal	m [m]		n [n]					ԅ [ŋ]
Plosive	p [p] b [b]		t [t] d [d] ț [ţ]	j [dʒ] t̾ [ʦ]			ʾ [ɕ]	c [k] g [g] c̦ [ķ̧]	q [q]			̛ [ʔ]
Fricative
Affricate
Approximant
Trill
Flap or tap
Lateral fric.
Lateral app.
Lateral flap

NB. The fricative sounds [x] and [ɣ] are allophones of the phonemes /k/ and /g/, respectively.

Vowels

	Front	Near-front	Central	Near-back	Back
Close
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open