Lingua Ignota

From Freepedia

Lingua Ignota is the first known constructed language. It was devised by the German abbess, visionary, artist, composer, physician, and mystic St Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century, apparently for mystical purposes. The name is Latin for unknown language.

Hildegard partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, the Wiesbaden Codex and Berlin MS (both ca. 1200). The text is a lexicon of 1011 words in Lingua Ignota, with glosses mostly in Latin, sometimes in German; the words appear to be a priori coinages, mostly nouns with a few adjectives. Most of them refer to body parts, diseases, religion, trees, herbs, birds, and insects. Characteristic is the fact that many words end in -z: aigonz "god", aieganz "angel", zuuenz "saint", enz. Grammatically is appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar.

It is unknown what the precise purpose of Lingua Ignota was; nor do we know who besides its creator were familiar with it. In the 19th century some believed that Hildegard intented her language to be an ideal, universal language. However, nowadays it is generally assumed that Lingua Ignota was devised as a stealth language; like Hildegards "unheard music", it would have come to her by divine inspiration. The glossary makes on suspect that the language was not created for religious purposes only.

Sample text

The only extant text in the language is the following short passage:

O orzchis Ecclesia, armis divinis praecincta, et hyacinto ornata, tu es caldemia stignmatum loifolum et urbs scienciarum. O, o tu es etiam crizanta in alto sono, et es chorzta gemma.

These two sentences are written mostly in Latin with five key words in Lingua Ignota; as only one of these is found in the lexicon (loifol "people"), it is clear that the vocabulary was larger than 1011 words.

Literature

Friedrich Wilhelm Emil Roth, "Glossae Hildigardis", in: Elias Steinmeyer and Eduard Sievers eds., Die Althochdeutsche Glossen, vol. III. Zürich: Wiedmann, 1895, 1965, pp. 390-404.
Marie-Louise Portmann and Alois Odermatt, eds., Wörterbuch der unbekannten Sprache. Basel: Verlag Basler Hildegard-Gesellschaft, 1986.