Lingua Ignota
| Lingua Ignota | |
|---|---|
| Lingua Ignota | |
St. Hildegard's 23 litterae ignotae.
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| Pronunciation | [ˈlinɡʷa iːɡˈnoːta] |
| Created by | St. Hildegard of Bingen, OSB |
| Date | 12th century |
| Purpose |
constructed language
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
A Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language") was described by the 12th century abbess of Rupertsberg, St. Hildegard of Bingen, OSB, who apparently used it for mystical purposes. To write it, she used an alphabet of 23 letters denominated litterae ignotae.
She partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, both dating to ca. 1200, the Wiesbaden Codex and a Berlin MS (Lat. Quart. 4º 674), previously Codex Cheltenhamensis 9303, collected by Sir Thomas Phillipps. The text is a glossary 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. Grammatically it appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar.
The purpose of Lingua Ignota is unknown and it is not known who, besides its creator, was familiar with it. In the 19th century some believed that Hildegard intended her language to be an ideal, universal language. However, nowadays it is generally assumed that Lingua Ignota was devised as a secret language; like Hildegard's "unheard music", it would have come to her by divine inspiration. Inasmuch as the language was constructed by Hildegard, it may be considered one of the earliest known constructed languages.
In a letter to Hildegard, her friend and provost Wolmarus, fearing that Hildegard would soon die, asks ubi tunc vox inauditae melodiae? et vox inauditae linguae? (Descemet, p. 346; "where, then, the voice of the unheard melody? And the voice of the unheard language?"), suggesting that the existence of Hildegard's language was known, but there were no initiates that would have preserved its knowledge after her death.
The only extant text in the language is the following short passage:
These two sentences are written mostly in Latin with five key words in Lingua Ignota; as only one of these is unambiguously found in the glossary (loifol "people"), it is clear that the vocabulary was larger than 1011 words. (Higley 2007 finds probable correspondences for two other words.)
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