776 1/2 and Diacritical Marks
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Hi to all,
First congratulations to the forum, is a great Forum!!!
And of course for the book!!!
I have a few questions regards the diacritical marks:- how should I interpret the various signs(Āā/Ää/'/-)?
- lowercase and uppercase, how should be pronounced?
- why the diacritical marks are located in some rituals (eg LBRP) and in others not?
Thanks.
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@MMe said
"I have a few questions regards the diacritical marks:
- how should I interpret the various signs(Āā/Ää/'/-)?
- lowercase and uppercase, how should be pronounced?
- why the diacritical marks are located in some rituals (eg LBRP) and in others not?"
Help me out a little... besides the pentagram ritual section, what else are you looking at? (It's a big book... I could respond better if I knew exactly what you were looking at and wondering about.)
Answering as much of the above as I can just from the Pentagram ritual section:
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"A" with two dots over it is used through this section as roughly the English "ah" sound. The horizontal line above a vowel is the standard mark for "long vowel" (e.g., English long A = "ay" sound as in "play").
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Uppercase is used for accented syllables.
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I thought the pentagram ritual needed it.
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Many thanks for the quick response Mr Eshelman!!!
@Jim Eshelman said
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Help me out a little... besides the pentagram ritual section, what else are you looking at? (It's a big book... I could respond better if I knew exactly what you were looking at and wondering about.)
"Excuse me, I forget to add the Middle Pillar Ritual.
@Jim Eshelman said
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- [...]The horizontal line above a vowel is the standard mark for "long vowel" (e.g., English long A = "ay" sound as in "play").
- Uppercase is used for accented syllables.
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You and Regardie("Middle Pillar") says that the pronunciations should be uniform. I'm a little bit confused...
The quotation marks(') is to be used as a word divider, as in music solfège?
Thanks.
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@MMe said
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@Jim Eshelman said
"- [...]The horizontal line above a vowel is the standard mark for "long vowel" (e.g., English long A = "ay" sound as in "play").
- Uppercase is used for accented syllables.
"
You and Regardie("Middle Pillar") says that the pronunciations should be uniform. I'm a little bit confused..."
Is there an inconsistency or non-uniformity? Please point it out specifically. (BTW I don't see any diacritical marks in the Middle Pillar section, pp. 175-176).
"The quotation marks(') is to be used as a word divider, as in music solfège?"
That's an apostraphe. These markings were picked to be obvious to a native English speaker. How would the apostraphe be rendered in such a situation? (Rather than give rules, I'm first appealing to the native language instincts.)
But, to explain, in most cases that marks a schwa - a brief, unaccented vowel. In Hebrew, often these are run right across as if they aren't there or, other times, have a brief pause. You see one, for example, in the pronunciation for "Geburah," given (with two dots over the A to render it AH) as ve-g'booRA. The schwa in both G'burah and G'dulah is often rendered for convenience as an e, but should specifically be an unaccented and very brief vowel (usually pronounced more or less "uh" as in "duh," or the a in about.)
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@Jim Eshelman said
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@MMe said
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You and Regardie("Middle Pillar") says that the pronunciations should be uniform. I'm a little bit confused..."Is there an inconsistency or non-uniformity? Please point it out specifically.
"Uniformity for me is when I say for example:
"aaa - eee - iii
or
AAA - EEE - III"and not
"aaa - EEE - iii
or
a - EEEEEE - iii"If I have to accented some syllables or to lengthen some other vowels, there is, imho, no uniformity, I'm wrong?
May I ask you what do you mean for uniformity?@Jim Eshelman said
"(BTW I don't see any diacritical marks in the Middle Pillar section, pp. 175-176)."
Excuse me if I expressed myself badly, I forgot to add my question:
"3. why the diacritical marks are located in some rituals (eg LBRP) and in others not** (MP)**?"
Why in the Middle Pillar Ritual are there no diacritical marks?
@Jim Eshelman said
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That's an apostraphe. These markings were picked to be obvious to a native English speaker. How would the apostraphe be rendered in such a situation? (Rather than give rules, I'm first appealing to the native language instincts.)But, to explain, in most cases that marks a schwa - a brief, unaccented vowel. In Hebrew, often these are run right across as if they aren't there or, other times, have a brief pause. You see one, for example, in the pronunciation for "Geburah," given (with two dots over the A to render it AH) as ve-g'booRA. The schwa in both G'burah and G'dulah is often rendered for convenience as an e, but should specifically be an unaccented and very brief vowel (usually pronounced more or less "uh" as in "duh," or the a in about.)"
Thanks!!!
A last question about the hyphens as for the Names of the Archangels or Malkuth: how I should interpret?
Thanks.
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93,
I don't mean to distract from MMe's last question, but I'm just curious to know, Jim, had you put any consideration into putting together a CD of pronunciations, etc. to be included with a book like 776 1/2? I'd heard of Regardie's (I believe it was) CD for that purpose, but haven't heard it.
93 93/93.
AL H-ShMATh
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@MMe said
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@Jim Eshelman said
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@MMe said
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You and Regardie("Middle Pillar") says that the pronunciations should be uniform. I'm a little bit confused..."Is there an inconsistency or non-uniformity? Please point it out specifically.
"Uniformity for me is when I say for example: ..."
But my question was: Is there an inconsistency or non-uniformity in the book? If so, I'd like to correct it in future printings. (I note your examples, but you didn't say something like, "In this specific location you wrote it X, but in this other specific location you wrote it Y.")
"If I have to accented some syllables or to lengthen some other vowels, there is, imho, no uniformity, I'm wrong?"
If I'm understanding you correctly, then yes, you are wrong. I may be misunderstanding you, though.
It now occurs to me that maybe by uniformity you mean that every syllable is to be given equal emphasis and weight. This, indeed, is one important technique for Qabalistic vibration. (I had been understanding "no uniformity" to mean that I had been inconsistent in what I had shown in two different places in the book.)
"Excuse me if I expressed myself badly, I forgot to add my question:
"3. why the diacritical marks are located in some rituals (eg LBRP) and in others not** (MP)**?"
Why in the Middle Pillar Ritual are there no diacritical marks?"
Ah, now I understand. Possibly no good reason. At least part of the reason is that I already had those two documents separately prepared (in different venues), and incorporated them with some editing; that is, it's the way the material was already typed up.
Let me ask you, as a reader: Would you have preferred that this NOT be given for the Pentagram ritual, or that it BE given for the MP?
"A last question about the hyphens as for the Names of the Archangels or Malkuth: how I should interpret?"
A clear syllable break. (Not a flitting pause as with the schwa.) For the archangels, the hyphen was used to better (visually) distinguish the accented syllables from the unaccented syllables.
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@Al Ha-Shema said
"I don't mean to distract from MMe's last question, but I'm just curious to know, Jim, had you put any consideration into putting together a CD of pronunciations, etc. to be included with a book like 776 1/2? I'd heard of Regardie's (I believe it was) CD for that purpose, but haven't heard it."
To include that in the book would dramatically increase the price.
Let's suppose that we could, alone, manufacture the CD for under $10. (Heck, let's even go crazy and imagine we could do it for $5, which is not much more than the cost a CD blank.) Then we have to have special processes at the bindery, suchj as mounting an envelope inside the cover, adding the CD to the envelope (a manual process unless we went to the even more expensive solution of creating a special bind in page and paying a tip-in fee as was done for the special four-color authentication page inside the leather-bound deluxe edition of 776 1/2.) This also may affect the width of the spine. Altogether, from a crude estimate, adding this to the book (given that it's not a standard part of our publishing methods, like, say, standard procedures for computer book publishers) would increase the price by as much as $60 (if we took a little bit of a hit on it cutting into the small profit margin). Not worth it to the reader, I'm sure!
Maybe cheaper than that... we haven't priced it... so I'm going from what I know of publishing costs. It makes the point, though.
Now, a separate question (and perhaps your underlying question) would be: But how about just making the CD, and making it available on its own? We could probably do this for $15-$20 plus shipping costs. I think I could find someone with an extraordinary voice, and someone else willing to donate most of the time and energy to record and engineer it. It would be a distinct project. If we did such a thing, what would you want included on it?
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Maybe another option would be making the audio available online. Obviously you'd have to offset the cost of the recording... If you wanted to make the online audio available only to people who'd purchased the book, I'm sure that's doable, either in using the barcode or by some other means that doesn't immediately leap into my head. Or, of course, you could make it available for purchase online, via iTunes or any other means, and just have links to it printed in the book.
As to what I would want to include on it, I suppose that would of course take some planning out... The first thing that comes to mind would be a language-course-style guide to the pronunciations. It might also be a good idea to include general words that are commonly mispronounced in esoteric circles. (Just to list a few that cause people trouble: "Thoth"; "Goetia"; "Crowley = crow-lee, not crau-lee"; those are just a few that jump quickest to mind.) But the idea of coming up with an audio file, now that I'm getting the noodle working, seems like an exciting idea. I'm sure with a little thought several things would come to mind that would be useful to include and explore -- but then of course you would likely need to keep it fairly brief and not go overboard
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I'm not interested in doing anything that broad; but I'd consider a product that addressed key words in particular languages, say Hebrew and Greek. It might include a discussion of pronunciation within that language overall, but would need to focus primarily on giving pronunciations of a specific words set (e.g., words of a specific ritual or set of rituals, or a list of commonly encountered words, etc.).
One issue, though, is that visual/textual materials would need to accompany it. One would have to reference diacritical marks native to the languages, and other factors. If it's more than a couple of sheets of paper, then it becomes an actual printing cost / binding project etc., and adds a different dimension to manufacturing and pricing. (I would, therefore, like to keep such a thing reduced to a couple of sheets of paper.)
One also has to plan where to start - the baseline of the audience. For example, we may simply start with presuming that one knows the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, can read and write the letters at will, knows their names, etc.
As I said... it's a project all of its own.
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I see what you mean. Food for thought, though... I'll let it percolate and if any ideas pop up I'll get back again.
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@JIm
Pronunciation of the god names on a cd would be very helpful
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@Frater ALLAShALLA said
"Pronunciation of the god names on a cd would be very helpful
"Do you mean the Hebrew divine names? Or something else?
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This is just one of your readers speaking, but I would pay $200+ for 776 1/2 & pronunciation CD.
EDIT: Perhaps it would be more useful to release such a CD with the introductory book you mentioned in this post?
-ANEA
"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." -
@Jim Eshelman said
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@Frater ALLAShALLA said
"Pronunciation of the god names on a cd would be very helpful"Do you mean the Hebrew divine names? Or something else?"
Well, one I word I have always been confused about is IAO. Is the I pronounced "eye" of "ee". Is the A pronounced "ah" or "aye". Stuff like that.
I would think all the divine names in Greek and Hebrew would be important.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
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@Frater ALLAShALLA said
"Well, one I word I have always been confused about is IAO. Is the I pronounced "eye" of "ee". Is the A pronounced "ah" or "aye". Stuff like that."
Eeee-Ahhhh-Ohhhhh
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ty
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@Jim Eshelman said
"If we did such a thing, what would you want included on it?"
Enochian pronunciation guide. I have read the suggestions for how to pronounce Enochian in Regardie's The Golden Dawn, but they seemed rather general without actually hearing this put into practice by someone who knows what they are doing.
It only takes a one exposure to someone suggesting an alternate pronunciation to those rules to make one very unsure of ones own interpretation. Even people connected with Regardie's previous work, like the Cicero's seem to suggest pronunciations for the Enochian words used in the Greater Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram that seem to ignore some of the guidelines laid down in the Golden Dawn.
Love and Will
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@RobertAllen said
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@Jim Eshelman said
"If we did such a thing, what would you want included on it?"Enochian pronunciation guide."
That would be a separate project... but, in any case, just get Laycock's Enochian Dictionary and you have nearly everything I'd say (and applied to the entire known Enochian vocabulary).
"I have read the suggestions for how to pronounce Enochian in Regardie's The Golden Dawn, but they seemed rather general without actually hearing this put into practice by someone who knows what they are doing."
Those instructions are specifically for chanting Enochian, rather than (as if conversationally) speaking it. The instructions also were originally intended only for Divine Names and a few other things. In any case, their a formula - more like instructions on how one sings Gregorian chant - and not actual pronunciation (in the same sense as dictionary pronunciation) - the latter you will get from Laycock.
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"Now, a separate question (and perhaps your underlying question) would be: But how about just making the CD, and making it available on its own? We could probably do this for $15-$20 plus shipping costs. I think I could find someone with an extraordinary voice, and someone else willing to donate most of the time and energy to record and engineer it. It would be a distinct project. If we did such a thing, what would you want included on it?
"How about on iTunes or something similar? A distribution online via MP3 - for a price of course. I know pirating comes into play there, but pirating risks are similar for CDs. Just a thought. However, I would be willing to spend the dough on it. I've listened to Regardie, some people on YouTube (with a grain of salt), and some Podcasts I've heard.
It helps us extreme novices in grounding us in knowing we're actually getting the basics down properly.