Re: a 12th century conlang

sidonian wrote:

> Hi you guys
>
> (you guys = non-gender specific 2nd person plural pronoun ;-)
>
> I always run into the "ask-a-linguist" archives whenever I'm
> searching for arcane information on the 'net.  Anyway,  something
> I read in one of these messages intrigued me.
>
> "...the only other language constructed by a woman was the one
> from Hildegard of Bingen..."
> -- Suzette Haden Elgin (apparently)
>
> Has anyone heard of this medieval conlang?  I'm a bit of a fan
> of Hildegard Von Bingen and I had never heard of her
> inventing a language before.  Does anyone have any idea
> where I could find out more about it?  It would be fascinating
> to see what it was like.  I've done a seach of the conlang
> archives.  Hildegard von Bingen seems to have been
> mentioned twice but I couldn't find any real discussion of
> her conlang work.
Yes indeed.  I mentioned her in my talk about all us guys, theone I gave in
Florida a few days ago.  She, or someone else,
apparently collected a list of nouns, 1011 of them, in something
called the _Lingua Ignota_.    These range  from God
and His angels to the lowly cricket.   She uses her invented
words in her hymns, wherein she has adjectives, but the list
has only nouns.  There is a German edition of this,  that I
acquired through interlibrary loan:  M.L. Portmann and A.
Odermatt's _Worterbuch der unbekannten Sprache (Basel:
Basler Hildegard-Gesellschaft, 1986).  But the best study
to date has been made by Jeffrey Schnapp, who has a good
bibliography on other studies.  This is his article called
"Virgin Words:  Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua Ignota and
the Development of Imaginary Languages Ancient to Modern,"
in _Exemplaria_ 3.2 October (1991): 267-298.   I critiqued
his "generalizations" about invented languages; he's too ready
to modify his findings with words like "always" and "never":  ex.
"Every imaginary language is a _bricolage_."  Or:  "The result
is almost always an 'impoverishment' of the natural languages
in question: a language reduced to a limited set of open vowels,
prone to syllabic reduplication and to excessive syntactical
parallelism and symmetries."  He talks a lot about the "infantilism"
of invented languages, generally replicating and lauding Yaguello's
cynical and over-generalized announcements.  Hildegard, however,
he holds up on a pedestal, and while he won't give us much about
her language, he does show us the taxonomies, the categories,
that her words fall into-- the Supernatural, the Human, the Church,
the Secular, Time, the Socio-Economic, and the Natural World.

With a little tweaking, I can put my paper, which isn't published
yet, on a separate webpage and give people permission to
look at it.  But it's still in formation, and I want to publish it.
So it can't be quite public yet, or open to quotation.  Suzette
Hayden Elgin notes in a note that she had written her Grammar
of La'adan before she had heard of Hildegard of Bingen.  I
finally got the book, thanks to some of you.

So email me privately if you want me to put a copy in HTML
format.  The session director asked if I would submit it to the
conference Proceedings.  If I expand this for publication, I
may need some suggestions.

Sally Caves