29-11-2016, 07:34 AM
More to the point, I am unaware of any attempt to ever use Gematria to translate words.
The whole point of Gematria was to identify the words of God. It worked because Hebrew uses letters as numbers (as a very basic example of how this works, because I can't type Hebrew on this keyboard, imagine a=1,b=2,c=3 etc or read the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.entry). Gematria evolved quite naturally because of the Hebrew habit of creating words out of numbers. So they have a convention for the numbers 15 and 16, for example, because written out in full these two words are alternate Divine Names and should not be used in everyday conversation.
But they never tried to use the words they created to translate words into a different language.
In a way, you're using arithmancy, which was a European Renaissance method of divination by assigning random numbers to letters. Again, this was used to identify divine or mystic properties in words or numbers.
But there isn't a precedent, in my knowledge, for anyone trying to translate between languages - for the very reasons that Koen pointed out above, it's pointless and a waste of time because your words could mean anything.
The whole point of Gematria was to identify the words of God. It worked because Hebrew uses letters as numbers (as a very basic example of how this works, because I can't type Hebrew on this keyboard, imagine a=1,b=2,c=3 etc or read the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.entry). Gematria evolved quite naturally because of the Hebrew habit of creating words out of numbers. So they have a convention for the numbers 15 and 16, for example, because written out in full these two words are alternate Divine Names and should not be used in everyday conversation.
But they never tried to use the words they created to translate words into a different language.
In a way, you're using arithmancy, which was a European Renaissance method of divination by assigning random numbers to letters. Again, this was used to identify divine or mystic properties in words or numbers.
But there isn't a precedent, in my knowledge, for anyone trying to translate between languages - for the very reasons that Koen pointed out above, it's pointless and a waste of time because your words could mean anything.