The speech of the celestial angels abounds in the vowels A (ah, as in father), and U (as u in rule). One may often determine from the Hebrew vowels in a passage which words belong to the class of celestials and which to the spirituals — i.e., whether they involve good or truth. The former use more frequently the sounds of O and U, for they have a full tone, and also occur oftener in the Third Heaven. (Heaven and Hell 241; True Christian Religion 278;, Spiritual Experiences 5112, 5620, 5787)

5620. Heavenly angels have spoken with me about the Hebrew language, that all its letters, or syllables, have a correspondence, and that, in accordance with its bends and curves, they signify inward things in accordance with heavenly forms. I was given occasion to examine the letters from beginning to end, and certain words, and they said what the correspondence is, except for some rough letters such as [Hebrew: Daleth, Caph and Koph] ¹ and several others which are pronounced roughly. But they said that in the degree there is roughness in them, they do not correspond. And therefore, they said, in the earliest times they were not rough but soft, and that therefore in each of letters like this there is a point in the middle, and this point means that it is pronounced roughly, but without a point in the middle it is not pronounced roughly. All roughness pertains to spiritual matters and therefore points are in the middles of them.

[2] In addition they said, which I too have often noticed, that they [i.e., the heavenly angels] do not have the vowels i and e, but a, o, and especially u, and that y ² is intermediate between heavenly and spiritual. And because they are like this and only serve the sound, in the Hebrew language there are also no vowels as in other languages, but they are added by characters above and below.

Footnotes:

241. Angels who live in the Lord's heavenly kingdom talk much the same way as angels who are citizens of the Lord's spiritual kingdom. However, heavenly angels talk from a deeper level of thought than spiritual angels do. Further, since heavenly angels are attuned to the good of love for the Lord, they talk from wisdom, while spiritual angels — being attuned to the good of thoughtfulness toward their neighbor (which in its essence is truth, see 215)-talk from intelligence. For wisdom comes from what is good and intelligence from what is true.

The speech of heavenly angels is like a gentle stream, soft and virtually unbroken, while the speech of spiritual angels is a little more resonant and crisp. Then too, the vowels U and O tend to predominate in the speech of heavenly angels, while in the speech of spiritual angels it is the vowels E and I. The vowels stand for the sound and in the sound there is the affection; for as already noted (236), the sound of angels' speech is responsive to their affection, and the articulations of the sound, or the words, correspond to the individual ideas that stem from their affection. For this reason, the vowels do not belong to the language but to a raising of its words, by means of sounds, toward various affections according to the state of each individual. So in Hebrew the vowels are not written and are also pronounced variously. This enables angels to recognize what someone's quality is in respect to affection and love.

Further still, the language of heavenly angels lacks any hard consonants and rarely puts two consonants together without inserting a word that begins with a vowel. This is why the little word and is inserted so often in the Word, as can be determined by people who read the Word in Hebrew, in which language that word is soft and in either pronunciation is a vowel sound. We can also learn some of this from the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible, since the words belong to either a heavenly or a spiritual category. That is, they involve either what is good or what is true, with the expressions involving what is good making ample use of the vowels U and O and to some extent A, and the expressions involving what is true making use of E and I.

Since affections are expressed primarily through sounds, words that use U and O are well loved in human language to express great matters like heaven and God. Musical sounds tend in this direction as they rise, when they are dealing with such matters, but not when they are dealing with lesser things. This is why the art of music is so adept at expressing various kinds of affection.