A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

notes on hildegard’s “unknown” language and writing 319
no other parts of speech; there are no rules of usage or of pronunciation.
What we have here is a word list of about a thousand nouns, and nothing
else. Just as Hildegard’s letters are arranged hierarchically—that is, with
the most important recipients and writers at the beginning of the collection
and the less important toward the end—we fijind that classifijications
of words are in groups, starting with spiritual beings and ending with
the lower elements of creation. We know the meanings of these words
because they are accompanied by an interlinear Latin translation.
The vocabulary begins with six types of being that are in the spiritual
realm; in order, they are aigonz (God), aieganz (angel), ziuienz (saint),
liuionz (savior), diuueliz (devil), and ispariz (spirit).11 Following these types
of spiritual beings, there are words for humanity, equivalent to “human,”
“man,” and “woman.” One cannot help but be struck by the appearance of
the word for “woman”: vanix (which has nothing to do with the words for
“human” and “man,” which are inimois and iur, respectively).
An outline presentation of this vocabulary, from beginning to end,
would be roughly in this fashion; the headings are inferred by the nature
of the nouns and their groupings, and the numbers that appear are the
ordinal numbers that can be linked to each of the nouns.12
I. Words for the spiritual realm
I.A. Spiritual entities
I.B. The human being as God’s creature
I.C. God’s human servants
II. Words for the human realm
II.A. Kinship relations and the human body
II.A.1. Members of the family
II.A.2. Suffferers of disease or accident
II.A.3. Parts [and excretions] of the human body
II.A.4. Skin diseases
11 The orthography is presented in keeping with its appearance in the Riesenkodex. It
is impossible to avoid the possibility of minim confusion in the transcription; for example,
the word ziuienz may well be zuuenz. I have opted for ziuienz on the basis of the way
that the word diuueliz appears, in that the fijirst minim following the initial “d” has been
highlighted by a later hand. Of course, there is no way of being certain that the work of
this later hand is accurate.
12 These headings and numbers are based on those established by Higley, Hildegard of
Bingen’s Unknown Language, pp. 161–88; adaptations in square brackets are my own.