11 / JUN / 2025

Languages in The Valkyrie Program

This week, like the week before it, I'd like to talk a bit about the progress of The Valkyrie Program.

If you've noticed the minor changes I've made to Prelude and the table of contents for Third Surface, you'll note that this is my second time changing the language around for a few key phrases.

At the end of Prelude, Samael initially said "In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti" in Latin before reaping the souls of Dana's parents. Afterwards, the language was changed to Greek with him saying "En to onómati tou Patrós, kai tou Yioú, kai tou Agíou Pnéumatos." Now, the phrase has changed again to "B’shem Aba, Wabra, Rukha d’Qudsha." Similarly, the titles to two chapters in Third Surface began as "Acceperint Gladium" and "Gladio Peribunt" in Latin, then were "Hoi Labontes Machairon" and "En Machairē" in Greek, and are now "Hanon Dansab Sayphe" and "b'Sayphe n'Muthon."

So why did I change the language so many times, and why have I finally settled on this mysterious third language?

The simple answer is that this is the language of the angels. More specifically, this is the language used by angels when they say a prayer or speak to God the Father. When I first decided that they ought to speak a "holy language," I simply settled on Latin and left it at that. Having grown up in a Catholic community, I've long been used to Latin being the language of the Church, and furthermore the language of God. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if my idea of Latin as a holy language really stood on a solid foundation. True, Jesus lived and died in ancient Rome under Roman rule, and Latin was the language of Rome, but then so many authors of the New Testament were Greek. In fact... wasn't the New Testament itself first written in Greek?

I did a little research and found that, yes, the New Testament was originally written in Greek, while the Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew Torah. Now, my intention with developing Heaven is not to simply establish it as Catholicism being the "true religion." On the contrary, what I'm looking to pursue is a combination of Catholic, Orthodox, and Folk Christianity as a unique but unified structure of Heaven. In essence, I want Heaven to resemble what the Church could have believed in before the Great Schism. With that in mind, I felt that sticking to the original languages of the Bible was a better idea than mindlessly saying "Latin!" and calling it at that. So, I changed the prayers and Bible quotes to Greek and took note to do that in the future.

But wait... Jesus didn't speak Greek, did he? I mean, the guy was roaming around modern-day Palestine, which is pretty far from Greece last time I checked. And this was ancient Rome, too, so maybe he was speaking Latin after all?

So I looked it up, and it turns out Jesus spoke a language called "Aramaic."

Now, what is Aramaic? Well, as I found out from trying to find an Aramaic version of the Bible, it's not a language but a group of Semitic languages originating from Syria. If one were to try finding an Aramaic Bible, the best thing they could get their hands on would be the Peshitta, written in Syriac. Syriac itself is a dialect of Aramaic used by commoners, and originates from Edessa, now the Turkish city of Urfa. Linguistically and geographically speaking, this is as close as we can get to the spoken word of Jesus Christ in the Bible... so long as you ignore that the Peshitta's New Testament was translated from Greek.

One problem, though: Every version of the Peshitta I could find online only had it in Syriac script with an English translation. If I were to try finding a transliteration to the English alphabet... well, I simply couldn't.

It's now that I turn your attention to my two best resources: Dukhrana Biblical Research and The Holy Aramaic Scriptures. These are what I've used to transliterate the Peshitta into English, and I need to stress that I know for a fact I've gotten most of my transliterations wrong.

Let me just walk you all through my method of transliterating the Holy Trinity as Samael says it at the end of Prelude. This prayer is originally found in Matthew 28:19, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." Simple enough, let's just plug that into Dukhrana to find the passage... and discover that the transliteration looks like this:

"zlw hkyl tlmdw klhwn ᶜmmᵓ wᵓᶜmdw ᵓnwn bšm ᵓbᵓ wbrᵓ wrwḥᵓ dqwdšᵓ"

...fucking what? How am I meant to pronounce that‽

Ah, turns out I have to click the boxes for "vowel signs" and set the transliteration to "Latin."

"zel hāḵīl talmeḏ kulhon ᶜamme waᶜmeḏ ᵓennon bəšem ᵓaḇā waḇrā wərūḥā dəqūḏšā"

That's... marginally better. But still, how am I meant to pronounce that? I know that "ə" is a schwa and that "š" is meant to be an "sh" sound, but even knowing that and the indications for long vowels, it isn't very helpful.

Enter again: The Holy Aramaic Scriptures.

When I first found this website it didn't seem too helpful with transliterating, however it did have a few key words and phrases transliterated. If I were to look at Matthew 28:19 there, I would find that "Holy Spirit" is written as "Rukha d’Qudsha." Which looks a lot like the the "wərūḥā dəqūḏšā" in Dukhrana's transliteration.

Thus began a process of reverse-engineering Dukhrana's transliteration through the small snippets given by The Holy Aramaic Scriptures, and a few headaches in the process. What began as the indecipherable "zlw hkyl tlmdw klhwn ᶜmmᵓ wᵓᶜmdw ᵓnwn bšm ᵓbᵓ wbrᵓ wrwḥᵓ dqwdšᵓ" became "B’shem Aba, Wabra, Rukha d’Qudsha." Which I know for a fact cannot be completely correct. I was basically thrown to the wolves in terms of transliterating things, and the fact that so few Westerners even study Syriac only made things harder on me.

This same process was used to title the chapters "Hanon Dansab Sayphe" and "b'Sayphe n'Muthon," which are lifted from Matthew 26:52, "all who draw the sword will die by the sword." The wording in the Peshitta is a bit different, as it says that "those who take up swords will die by swords," but the message still comes out the same.

Dukhrana's transliteration was "hānon dansaḇ saype bəsaype nəmūṯon," which was easy as far as "hānon dansaḇ saype" went, but not so much with "bəsaype nəmūṯon." The schwa has a tendency to be used as a pause, as it was with "wərūḥā dəqūḏšā" becoming "Rukha d'Qudsha," but then "b'Sayphe n'Muthon" just didn't look right. "b'Sayphe Nmuthon" could have also been correct, as looking further into the word "nəmūṯon" made it seem like the N and M are meant to be pronounced together... but then that would be breaking the rules that Dukhrana seems to have set up thus far, with an apostrophe denoting a pause. In the end, I decided to go with "n'Muthon" with the knowledge that someone else could prove me wrong and lead to a correction, and that even if they didn't I would still be able to get away with it since nobody in the West knows Syriac.

Now, some of you might be wondering, "Why not Hebrew? Why go through all this trouble when you could just leave the language of the angels as a better-known and studied language that would save you this headache?"

The simple answer is that Hebrew is the language of the Old Testament, which the New Testament seeked to supplant. In the setting of The Valkyrie Program, Christ coming to Earth was God's way of contacting humans for a second time to save everyone, not just the Jews as he had before. Instead of using a language specific to one ethnicity, he'd have to use a broad lexicon to appeal to the commoners. As such, the structure of Heaven underwent some changes to appeal to this new testament, and furthermore opened the door for saints to integrate with Heaven's inner workings.

Officially, masses and prayers in heaven are meant to be spoken in Aramaic as the "language to God." Hebrew, on the other hand, is the "language with God." If Aramaic is Heaven's "formal form" of speech, then Hebrew is the "informal form" which only those close to God are allowed to speak. Naturally, this would only involve the Seraphim and Cherubim as the highest orders of angels, and Gabriel as the only Archangel allowed to speak directly to God the Father. The other Archangels were once allowed to speak Hebrew, as it was Heaven's only language, but with the New Testament's restructuring, God the Father decided it best to distance Himself from the lower orders. Probably a good call, considering Lucifer and Satan's closeness to him before they fucked shit up and had to be cast down.

Anyways, I hope this gives some insight on what exactly goes into writing this story. As for progress on the Psychopomp chapter, it's been pretty slow-going thanks to intermittent bouts of depression. There were several days where I struggled to write any more than a paragraph, but thankfully I was able to get a good couple of pages done yesterday. I hope to have it done soon for you all, as I hate to keep people waiting when there are further promises on the horizon.

See you when I see you.

{ END LOG }

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