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From the final report of Yamaya, Royal Lexicographer-Assassin to His Majesty Apex IV

Anaphora is an Estate was Excruciated at either the end or the beginning of the Second Age (the testimony of those weakly bound in Time remains as frustrating as ever). If the end, then it was lost during the chaos that followed the Lethe Wind (Lord Entropy's most notorious act as lord of the Earth). If it were nearer the beginning, then it was lost during the Deluge, when Semyaza's brood of Nephilim was drowned.

True anaphora refered to neither of its meanings in this debased age: neither to the rhetorical device of repeating initial clauses, nor to the linguistic device by which a pronoun may refer to a noun that preceded it. But both of these echo the pattern of anaphora. If a word refers to itself, then a cycle is created, and when unrolled cycles give rise to repetition. To illustrate: if the list X consists of the number one, followed by the list X, then we may write "X = 1, X". But also: "X = 1, (1, X)", and "X = 1, (1, (1, X))" and so on ad infinitum. True anaphora did not merely refer to words; in some now-incomprehensible sense it included cycles that spanned the world of words and the world of matter and will. By speaking anaphorically men could create or unmake things, and by acting or making anaphoric objects they could create or unmake words. This recalls to me two things.

The first, and lesser, was the one I was told. Adam had the alleged power to name all the living things, and this was why the animals of Eden were not inbred -- Adam named them, and by naming them created a genetically-viable population. (This process was apparently continued by the old, miraculous race of men until the Deluge.)

The second, and greater, was the one inferred. Consider the notion of logos, the Word Made Flesh, the voice of the Creator upon the Deep. If Anaphora is gone, is Cneph silenced -- or dead?

Originally by Jere Genest as an "A" entry in the Lexicon of the Second Age