Tag: breath

Posted on in Heart of Language

5. Seed

The life cycle is reflected in language; all the words connected with creation, fertility, reproduction, have aer (air) in them, the same aer that forms the basis of speech.

In order to grow and bear fruit, a seed must be planted in the earth. Yes, but how is this process reflected in language?

A seed must be planted in the ground in order to bear fruit. It must be buried. That is, it must disintegrate (not remain whole) in order to give rise to new life. This is surely a metaphor for our own resurrection.

So, a seed dies, and that is why the two words are connected in reverse if we interchange the front vowels e and i. We cannot bring forth new life except by being put in the ground (our ego, that is). We become dead to our selfish demands. And out of that deadness comes a new, unrestricted potential.

Alternatively, we can add the letter l to seed and get sleep (by rotating the letters d and p). Seeds have been known to sleep in the ground for hundreds of years before sprouting and giving forth new life. In the ancient world, early Christians referred to burial sites not as “graves”, but as “resting places”, because the people buried there were not dead, but asleep.

The seed dies and puts forth first a root and then a shoot. Do you see how these words are connected – seed with root (phonetic pair d-t, step in the alphabet r-s), root with shoot (step in the alphabet r-s, addition of h)?

A shoot appears above ground (reminding us of the seed’s existence), and as it does so, it closely resembles a tooth (step in the alphabet s-t) emerging from the gum. Language is often graphic like this.

As the root divides into two (too, addition of r), so the shoot divides into three and becomes a tree (addition of h). It cannot become a tree except by dividing, by putting out branches, as cells divide in the human body. This division, paradoxically, leads to increase.

One is three, as in the case of the Holy Trinity. The tree harnesses the power of the sun (Son) through each leaf (phonetic pair l-r, pair of letters that look alike f-t). It produces a flower, which wilts, giving way to a fruit (froot) with the seed in it. And the whole process begins anew.

So, we have: seed (dies/sleep)-root (two)-shoot (tooth)-tree (three)-leaf-fruit (root), all perfectly reproduced by language.

It is the earth that enables this, and perhaps it is time we notice the presence of air (written aer in Latin and Greek) in so many words that have to do with creation, fertility, reproduction: aer-earth-water-breath, bread, breast (all three sources of nourishment that share the same first four letters with the phonetic pair d-t, addition of h/s)-create-father.

They all have aer in them, just as language is impossible without breath (we add voice to our breath to form the vowels; we obstruct our breath, with or without voice, to form the consonants). This again provides a link between the physical world (we cannot live without breathing) and language (aer is in many words connected with creation).

And by taking a step in the alphabet, r-s, as we did with God-ego (d-e) and father-gather (f-g), we find aer in sea (imagine a sea without aer in it, it would be dead).

This brings us back to the account of creation in the Book of Genesis. On day three, the earth was created (spoken into being), together with the sea, plants yielding seed and the fruit tree.

All reflected in the words we speak.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 5/15

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Posted on in Heart of Language

3. Human

The elements of speech – breath, water and flesh – are the same elements that are present in the act of creation in the Book of Genesis. The world was spoken into being, which means that we, and the world around us, are a form of language.

Language is made up of three elements: breath, water and flesh.

The first element is breath. Breath forms the basis of all speech. Without breath, you are dead. Breath is represented by the letter h, a letter that is dropped in colloquial speech and silent in some languages, but for me the most important letter in the alphabet:

h   (breath)

The second element is water. This is when we add voice to our breath and form the vowels. Hold a vowel sound for long enough, and water will collect in your mouth. The vowels are listed in the alphabet in the following order: a-e-i-o-u. But this is misleading because the vowel sounds are formed, from the back of the mouth (where language originates), in a different order:

u-o-a-e-i   (water)

Since breath on its own doesn’t make a word (it only expresses exasperation), the first word that the human apparatus is capable of producing is the combination of breath, h, and the first vowel sound to emerge from the throat, u: hu. You might think this is unremarkable, but, as we have seen, hu is Sanskrit for “invoke the gods” and the root of our word God.

So the first utterance we can make by our very nature is to call on God, just as when we move away from the ego and produce the symbols A + O, we say another name of God, Alpha and Omega. While the science of etymology stipulates that human derives from the Latin word for “man”, homo, I would suggest that really it is a combination of hu and man. We are spiritual beings.

The third element of language is flesh. We obstruct the passage of breath with our lips or tongue (our flesh) and produce the consonants, which can be voiced or voiceless. The consonants are divided into phonetic pairs according to where they are produced in the mouth. There are seven simple pairs:

b-p   d-t   f-v   g-k   l-r   m-n   s-z   (flesh)

We see all these elements – breath, water and flesh – in chapters 1 and 2 of the Book of Genesis. Take, for example, Genesis 1:1-2:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

I would suggest that this passage in Genesis is really a description of speech. Or the creation of man in Genesis 2:6-7:

But a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Again, all three elements of language are present, which would suggest that the world was literally spoken into being. This would explain the proximity between space and speak (the letter c, a redundant letter in English, can be pronounced k or s), and also the presence in world of word and lord (the reiterative verse “And God said”).

What is also remarkable is the word these three elements have in common: father. We have seen the phonetic pair f-v, but v is also connected to b and w (think of languages such as modern Greek, Spanish, Latin and German), so through the intermediary of v, I can make the connection f-b/w.

In this way, we see that breath and father have the same letters, water is in father with the addition of h, and flesh is in father with the addition of a (phonetic pair l-r, step in the alphabet s-t).

Father contains speech.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 3/15

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Posted on in Theological English

Theological English (3): The Alphabet

In this fourth video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne looks at the twenty-six letters that make up the Latin alphabet as it is used in English – h, five vowels, three semi-vowels, fourteen consonants, and three “redundant” letters (c, q and x) – and sees how these letters are used to represent the three elements of speech which are also the three elements of creation: breath, water, and flesh.

To access all the videos in this course, use the drop-down menu “Theological English (Video Course)” above. The videos can be watched on Vimeo and YouTube.

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (11): Father (1)

So now we are diving down into the depths of language and discovering that language has a lot to tell us about the meaning of human life and about the world we live in. We are here to count down from the ego, I, to God, O, as we saw in words like LIVE and LOVE, SIN and SON, CHRIST and CROSS. Christ himself, who is God and has no need to count down, came down to earth so that he could show us how to do this. He came down and was incarnate in order to translate for us the meaning of life. He did this by means of parables, writing for the spiritually blind.

 

But we have also seen that the world is a spiritual womb in which the body of the Church is being formed until the end of time. Just as we have physical and spiritual blindness, so we have a physical and spiritual birth. Sadly, many of us in this life focus solely on the physical side of things, to the detriment of our spiritual growth. We must open not only our physical eyes, but also our spiritual eyes. This is why ‘I’ and ‘eye’ sound the same. Because an open I is O.

 

God does not let us dive for too long. We must come back to the surface for air. And just as God separated the waters from the waters in order to create the dome of the sky (Gen 1:6-8), so we see that air is extremely important to us. We started this series of articles by talking about the Coronavirus, which has currently got us practising social distancing, something that was foreign to our way of thinking just a few months ago and is now ‘the new normal’. Viruses make it difficult for us to breathe, they precisely attack our air supply, as if we were divers in the water and our air supply was getting low or the connection with the bottle was faulty. We cannot gulp air as we would like to, and we realize how tenuous our connection to life really is.

 

The ancients spelled ‘air’ like this: ‘aer’. This is how it is written in Latin and Greek, and I find this extraordinarily significant. Imagine yourself on the surface of the sea, this line in creation where so many creatures live, criss-crossing the line in their search for food or to escape predators. A gentle breeze is ruffling the surface of the water, creating an effect like a desert, like pimpled flesh or a crinkled crisp. Our breathing is shallow, barely noticeable, just enough. We are on the line between two frighteningly different elements. And yet for nine months in our mother’s womb the element of water was normal to us and we breathed.

 

We have already seen how oxygen is present in water, so they cannot be altogether so different. Indeed, if we apply the alphabetical pair r-s, we will see that AER in reverse reads SEA. Just a step in the alphabet, that line we were talking about, a murmur in the ear (oh, EAR is obviously connected as well).

 

And we may notice that AER is in WATER if we take away the w and the t, thus confirming what we said about oxygen being in water.

 

AER is also in BREATH, another of the elements of speech/creation, but where does it come from, this element that we breathe? Where does the wind arise? Where is it when we wait in the heat of the day and it seems to have disappeared? Only the other day, I stood in my room and a cold current of air came in through the window, just like the current you sometimes get in Greek seas (off the west coast of Corfu), chilling your feet, providing welcome refreshment.

 

I can only assume that air, breath, comes from the Father, who breathed into the newly created human being the breath of life. Isn’t he the source of life, the source of all creation? Wasn’t it the Father who separated the waters from the waters in Genesis chapter 1? Hang on a moment, though, at the beginning of that chapter I remember there was a wind that swept over the face of the waters. Can that wind somehow be connected to the Holy Spirit? On the day of Pentecost, didn’t the Holy Spirit descend ‘like the rush of a violent wind’ (Acts 2:2)? Didn’t Christ himself breathe the Holy Spirit on his disciples (Jn 20:22), not because the Spirit proceeds from him, but because they are both part of the Holy Trinity and their lives are intertwined? WIND contains the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3 – a reflection of the Holy Trinity, which can also be found in words like GOD, WOOD and ONE.

 

But AER is in other words as well, for example FEAR. When fear assails us, we find it difficult to breathe, our breathing becomes rapid, we hyperventilate. What is fear? Well, it can be unfounded when it relates to our predictions for the future. In fact, I would say it generally is unfounded. And yet it can have a profound effect on our behaviour and make us RAGE (alphabetical pair f-g). Another kind of FEAR is SAFE (alphabetical pair r-s), the fear that makes us cling to our Father, what Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol describes as awe, love and reverence in our hearts.

 

And what is it that pumps the air, the oxygen, around our bodies? The organ called the HEART. AER is there also. If our heart stops, so does our air supply, just like divers in the water (though there is AER in WATER as well). We saw that HEART is connected with EARTH, and I would say that AER is the main characteristic that we associate with the earth – the ability to breathe.

 

We are beginning to see that AER is a crucial component of language. It is in SEA and WATER, it is in BREATH (which as the letter h is also in water or its chemical formula H2O), it is in FEAR and HEART (see how these two words are connected – isn’t this where we feel fear most keenly, when it strikes dread into our hearts?).

 

But interestingly enough we cannot only live by breathing. We must also eat: BREAD. When we are babies, we are reliant on our mother’s milk, which fills our bellies and provides us with protection: BREAST. BREATH-BREAD-BREAST. All three words contain AER and are sources of nourishment. How curious that they should be so similar!

 

BREAD is connected to WATER by the phonetic pair d-t and the ‘eighth’ phonetic pair, b-v-w, which we talked about at the end of the previous article.

 

And ‘breath’, if we apply the physical pair b-d, gives ‘thread’. Breath is like a thread, the thread that the Fates are waiting to snip. It is air – isn’t it? – that provides the continuum to our lives. We are alive inasmuch as we are breathing. This is why we can see that ‘breath’ is connected to ‘birth’ if I use the front vowels (a-e-i), but also to ‘death’ if I use the physical pair b-d and remove the r.

 

Breath is the thread that links birth and death. All this information is contained in language.

 

I open my mouth. Breath emerges from my mouth. God knows where it has come from. If I add voice, I can speak. I can imitate the Father in the act of creation (CREATE also contains AER). After all, I am made in his image and likeness (Gen 1:26).

 

There is the Father again, the source of all things, who begat the Son, who gives rise to the Spirit, who created us human beings and all that we can see (and cannot see).

 

He emerges from the shadows ‘at the time of the evening breeze’. There is AER in him as well. AER is in FATHER, just as BREATH is, EARTH and HEART, FEAR (FAITH) and WATER.

 

Air carries water; air is in water. We associate air with the letter h, but also with oxygen (O2). Perhaps that dividing line is thinner than we thought. Certainly creatures like gannets and flying fish think so.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com