Pronunciation / Translations, Pronunciation questions and translated texy goes here Options

Okay, this is my system of magical invokation so please don't laugh. When ever I am working with Arch-Angels, or anything for that matter, I use my own system of ancient Hebrew-Chaldean-Sumerian language substitution. (unless otherwise instructed) Most "learned" Hebraists scoff at this method, and the pronunciations of the words, but I have found it most effective especially when dealing with old and corrupt translations found in many of the Grimoires. Recently I have been longing to work with the Necromonicon, so I started looking at some of the invocations. Here is one example;
On page 65 (in my paperback copy) there is The Conjuration Of The Fire God, this is a very loose translation, but instead of GIBIL GASHURU UMUNA YANDURU TUSHTE YESH SHIR ILLANI U MA YALKI!... I came up with, Gabal Ga-sha-war Ya-ma-wan Ya-na-ha Ta-wash Yash Sha-yar Ya-lal-han Wa Ma Yal-qa. Which roughly means: "set a boundary (about me), make a tunnel or connect (to him), make ready to destroy, to shoot arrows. There is singing, (turn it) to wailing (howling). And the locust!??! This still needs much work; it took me about an hour for these few words (not to mention the mental drain). What do you think compared to any translations any of you have come up with?
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footnote: it is possible it seems that, YESH SHIR ILLANU U MA YALKI! could also maybe have something to do with "bring wailing and lamentation to his princes and king" since in the ancient languages there was generally no punctuation, so one word could have been mistakenly seperated into many words.

This post has been edited by ominous: Dec 28 2005, 12:52 PM

Greetings,

I keep chiming in on your posts because I find the issue of translating between archaic and modern languages fascinating, and indeed very powerful during ritual. I have some experience doing this from English to Egyptian and from English to Biblical Hebrew (my only experience with Akkadian is transcription of astronomical texts into English). You are right Distillate; it is much harder to start with the English.

In my experiences, I found that going word to word is nearly impossible especially when it comes to verb tenses and the complicated grammar. The best way to go is to take the entire sentence and find the core meaning, then write out a similar phrase in the archaic language in the simplest grammatical form … make sure the words of importance (titles, commands, names, etc.) are correct. You will never get it perfect (linguistically or grammatically speaking), but that is not the point as long as you have a clear intention behind the spoken words. The great thing about this is that you have some artistic license when it comes to pronunciation which permits you to vibrate words you wish to accentuate (this ends up sound ridiculously cheesy in English, but very powerful when using archaic language). In the end it is an extremely rewarding experience as you are in a sense meditating upon the incantation as you try to find its core meaning and translate it to the best of your abilities.

One last thing: Have you tried transliterating the text from our English alphabet back to the cuneiform? I did this with once with Egyptian and was very effective when I vibrated certain words and visualized the corresponding hieroglyphs manifesting from the sound. Of course, some of us do this during the LBRP with the Hebrew god names as well.