The Lingua ignota: an abbess's secret glossary

Aigonz means God, Aieganz means angel. They are the first words of a list that counts more than a thousand, compiled in the twelfth century by Hildegard of Bingen and preserved under the title Lingua ignota, unknown language. It is not a code for replacing letters, but an invented lexicon, with new words for heavenly beings, people, parts of the body, illnesses, garments, tools, plants and animals. It is one of the oldest documented examples of an artificial language in Europe.

An order from top to bottom

The glossary does not follow alphabetical order, but a hierarchy reflecting Hildegard's vision of the world. It begins with God, the angels and the saints, continues with the ranks of human society and of the Church, with family relations and parts of the body, and then descends towards the objects of daily life, buildings, the monastery's tools, down to plants and birds. Each invented word is matched by a gloss in Latin and often in medieval German.

This structure resembles that of medieval teaching glossaries, which gathered words by subject. Hildegard certainly knew these tools, and her list seems built on their model. The difference is that, instead of translating Latin into German, she introduces a third language, entirely new, which stands beside the other two. The result is a small mirror of the cosmos, ordered along a scale that runs from the Creator to the humblest creatures.

A language without grammar

The Lingua ignota consists almost entirely of nouns and a few adjectives. No verbs of its own are documented, nor rules of conjugation or declension. When the abbess used her words in a text, she inserted them into Latin sentences, following Latin grammar. For this reason many scholars describe it as a lexicon rather than a complete language, even though the project shows remarkable consistency in the formation of words.

Many words end in -ianz or -onz, and some seem to recall Latin or German in a distant way. Diuueliz, for example, denotes the devil, and the resemblance to the German Teufel is evident. In other cases the invention appears completely free. How Hildegard created her words remains largely mysterious.

Words in song

The only evidence of an actual use of the Lingua ignota is found in an antiphon composed by Hildegard herself, which begins with the words O orzchis Ecclesia. In the text, otherwise written in Latin, a few words of the unknown language appear, among them orzchis and loifolum. Hildegard's music has come down to us with its notation, and that antiphon is still performed and recorded today.

Already in the medieval accounts of Hildegard's life, gathered after her death, the unknown language appears among the extraordinary gifts attributed to the abbess, beside the visions and the musical compositions. For her contemporaries it was therefore not a mere learned pastime, but a sign of her inspiration, and she herself seems to have regarded it as part of her own spiritual mission.

The Lingua ignota remains a fascinating document. In an age when Latin was the language of culture and of the sacred, a Rhineland nun felt the need to give new names to God, to the angels and to the things of the world. In her invented words faith, curiosity about nature and the desire for a language closer to mystery are intertwined.