ConLang Enochian

The Background

In the CW TV series, Supernatural, a real world "language of the Angels" was often referenced and used by the characters. Enochian is the language that was apparently "given" to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley, but to be frank, I don't particularly believe any of that. This is not meant to be a resource for magic or mysticism. To be be brutally honest, in my opinion, the origins of Enochian basically comes down to a coupla dudes playing with a Ouiji board.

However, I did start looking at it to add flavor to writing angel characters in fan fiction. I admit that while I think the language is basically a besties friendship code just with a lot of sixteenth century astrology thrown in there, it is a fascinating bit of creativity. And I wanted to use it in my stories!

Thus, we run into the first problem of Enochian as it exists in the wild - there's not a whole lot of usuable vocabulary.

One of my main resources is The Complete Enochian Dictionary by Donald Laycock. Of the Enochian words listed, at least half of them are just the names of angels and demons. There is almost no usuable vocabulary. The grammar rules are unknown. There are - which honestly was par for the course of all languages at the time - at least three to four spellings for the same word, and sometimes three of four Enochian words that mean the exact same thing. You could pepper a fic with some of those, make it sound exotic! But, in the end, if you wanted to do what I wanted, which was have fully fleshed conversations represented in this language, well, fat chance.

That was, until I got the idea to just go whole ham and fuckin' pull a Johnny Ronny Reuel Tolkien, and fuckin' make this a working language. Take the bones, the vocabulary that was provided, and either add what words it needed or overhaul what it had into something resembling an actual language.

Thus, my ConLang Enochian project was born.

The Methods

As mentioned above, the main resource I'm using for the classical Enochian is The Complete Enochian Dictionary by Donald Laycock. Classical Enochian apparently has a grammatical system something like English with maybe some Latin, so I decided to use a mixture of English and Spanish grammatical features, or similar rules. For funsies I did start throwing in some of my own ideas, but you know, in a systematic way.

Now, for vocabulary that does not exist in that resource I decided to use Proto-IndoEuropean roots. Since the idea is that Enochian allows angels to speak to all languages, it made sense to use the root language behind a large chunk of the languages spoken on the planet. Now, admittedely, this will make ConLang Enochian pretty Eurocentric since I have neither the training nor the spoons to go looking into other language families and their forbearers.

So, from the classical Enochian of Dee and Kelley and the reconstructions of Proto-IndoEuropean, the hope is to have a language that is usuable but doesn't have to be completely "correct." I'm concerned with having the basics of grammar, and not the minutae nor forty-seven rules with a million exceptions.