“el grito surge en la raíz del lenguaje, antes de la palabra, en ese límite donde lo no-reconocido

de lo reprimido primordial, a punto de hacer irrupción, suscita el goce”. J. Lacan, “Réponse à

Marcel Ritter”

“el sujeto mujer abandona la extrañeza de lo simbólico a favor de una sensorialidad innombrable,
enfurruñada, múdica, suicida” (Kristeva, 1999: 178).

““Zazie logra llevar al registro de la interjección y de la injuria todo aquello que la civilización
propone como producto, en un torbellino desenfrenado, y nada la detiene, ni siquiera Napoleón.
Esta proposición es una máquina de desinflar, de pisotear semblantes, de revelar el estatuto de
semblante de todo aquello a lo que se dedica la gente masculina de su entorno” (Miller, 1993:
66) “Es una manera de decir que las mujeres no sostienen con gusto la idea de atrapar lo real con
el significante, la posición femenina implica cierta intuición de que lo real escapa al orden
simbólico” (Miller, 1993: 63).

Sembrando Flores volvía partida en dos y mal cosida tal como lo había previsto, con la cara
hacia atrás y el pelo adelante. De esto último no acusaba a nadie. El hecho de la cara vuelta
corría por cuenta de su absoluta responsabilidad: girar hacia el pasado tiene sus riesgos, y la nuca
frontal le había sido impuesta por las circunstancias. Nadie que no pueda mirar lo que está
ocurriendo será digno de su ojos, y sólo con ellos al revés del cuerpo puede confesar que existe
el margen de mundo. Armonía Somers

La palabra tiene su terrible límite. Más allá de ese límite está el caos orgánico. Después del final
de la palabra empieza el gran alarido eterno. Clarice Lispector

se arriesga a un lenguaje y un pensamiento otro, y responde a lo simple que no es simple, expone

los límites del lenguaje, el ser de las palabras; se desliza en esa intimidad de la simple dureza de
la piedra, pero no para engañarse creyendo que la dice en un lenguaje que no existe y que nos
falta desde siempre (el imposible lenguaje de las cosas), ni para lanzarse a la ilusión del silencio
(que es una palabra [que no es una palabra]). Gabriela Milone

Soy mujer que sola nací, dice2

Soy mujer que sola caí, dice

Porque está tu Libro3

Tu Libro de Sabiduría, dice

Tu lenguaje sagrado, dice

tu hostia que se me da, dice

tu hostia que comparte, dice

Así pues, la boca come y expira; la boca no sólo

habla, también guarda su brote salvaje, su grito animal, su sonido inhumano: la
guturalidad, ese sonido gutural de la lengua plegada contra el velo del paladar,
boca cerrada saboreando su propia piel, su propio fondo, entreviendo el abismo de
su garganta. Sonido sordo el gutural, tan animal como humano, que cifra el dolor, la
rabia, la impotencia, que iguala a todas las bestias que manducan en la tierra.
MILONE

La experiencia
propiamente poética es la de la exposición de una materia inaudita:
las palabras balbuceadas en una lengua aún no aprendida, quizá
nunca aprendida, siempre ex-puesta en la voz sola.8

Soy un ciervo: de siete púas,

soy una creciente: a través de un llano,

soy un viento: en un lago profundo,

soy una lágrima: que el Sol deja caer,

soy un gavilán: sobre el acantilado,

soy una espina: bajo la uña,

soy un prodigio: entre las flores,

soy un mago: ¿quién sino yo

inflama la cabeza fría con humo?

Soy una lanza: que anhela la sangre,

soy un salmón: en un estanque,

soy un señuelo: del paraíso,

soy una colina: por donde andan los

[poetas,

soy un jabalí: despiadado y rojo,

soy un quebrantador: que amenaza

[la ruina,

soy una marea: que arrastra la muerte,

soy un infante: ¿quién sino yo

atisba desde el arco no labrado del

[dolmen?

Soy la matriz: de todos los bosques,

soy la fogata: de todas las colinas,

soy la reina: de todas las colmenas,

soy el escudo: de todas las cabezas,

soy la tumba: de todas las esperanzas.6

MILONE: la voz ante el lenguaje, no se opondrían filosofía y poesía, sino que
antes bien, ambas sendas se entrecruzarían y experimentarían un
mismo riesgo: la soledad absoluta ante la materia bruta del lenguaje,
ante el misterio, no de algo indecible, sino de que el lenguaje sea,
tenga lugar.

BRISSET: El espíritu de la palabra es el mismo en toda la tierra y en todos los mundos habitados. Incluso los argots más bárbaros son
gritos venidos de los ancestros, porque están desde hace millones de años, impulsando todos los alaridos posibles, tanto que ninguna
combinación les ha sido extraña.

Socrates asserts that the “name giver” (onomatothete) can only really become an authoritative
word creator (onomaturge) if he is a lawgiver (nomothete).

When a Woman Invents Language When a woman invents language, antennas are raised. It is
usually scholarly men who have risen and fallen in this pursuit: Johannes Trithemius, Thomas
More, John Dee, François Rabelais, John Wilkins, Jonathan Swift, George Psalmanazar, Albert
Le Baron, Johann Martin Schleyer, Ledger Zamenhoff, and J.R.R. Tolkien, our most famous
inventor of fictional languages in the twentieth century. And yet Tolkien’s omission from
scholarly studies of language experiment reveals a persistent attitude that regards Quenya as
being without linguistic or academic capital because of its overexposure by fandom and its
underdevelopment of insanity.14 Hence it can bear no comparison to the more exotic “clang
associations” and “word salads” of schizophrenics, speaking in tongues, angelic speech,
elaborate hoaxes, and poetic neologisms that dominate the pages of Jed Rasula and Steve
McCaffery’s Imagining Language. 15 Tolkien himself put the real accomplishments behind his
Elvish languages in a closet, leaving behind a disordered series of notes that linguists have been
sorting through for decades.16 His essay “A Secret Vice,” one of the best and most sensitive
commentaries written on the topic of private 8 HILDEGARD OF BINGEN’S UNKNOWN
LANGUAGE language invention, emphasizes the intensely personal nature of this pursuit, and
explains his projects in cautious terms of shyness, intimacy, and inutility. He perspicuously
examines invented language in light of poetic language, and a passion that is private, obsessive,
and slightly embarrassing—a secret vice. 17 Compare this attitude to Hildegard’s brazen
announcement of her Lingua to Pope Anastasius, proof of her right to counsel him.18 Besides
Hildegard, the famous female inventors of language are recent: notably the “channeled” Martian
language of the Swiss medium Hélène Smith and the unrecorded imaginary language of Mary
Baker in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth the fictional and linguistic experiments by
Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzette Haden Elgin, and notable languages displayed online by
contemporary women. I will give special attention to these projects in chapters four and five.
Although they are worthy of study, I exclude men and women writers who poetically distort
natural language such as Lewis Carrol, James Joyce, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, or Aleksei
Kruchenykh and the Zaum movement; and length prevents me from examining invented phrases
exhibited in myriad voyage and science fiction novels. My focus is on sustained lexical and
grammatical replacements. Elgin’s work is particularly important in that her Láadan is a feminist
and utopian language meant to repair linguistic essentialisms, and is the most prominent modern
invention that targets women users. It must be made clear, however, that no line of female
linguistic creation started by Hildegard can be established. While Barbara Newman eloquently
describes Hildegard’s Christian symbolism as a “theology of the feminine,” wherein female
imagery for Church, Spirit, and Creation are favored among the theologians with whom she best
fits,19 Hildegard cannot be said to have created a “linguistics of the feminine” in her Ignota
Lingua. Intellectually difficult and off-putting, she founded no school of female spirituality,
much less a school of imaginary languages. Her Lingua was discovered late by the modern
world, and expresses the hierarchies of the patriarchic era she lived in. Furthermore, no
particularly feminine aesthetic or grammar can be ascertained in any language created by a
woman. Euphony, open syllables, liquids, front consonants, verb–object structures, preferences
for “z” or “sh” or “l” or any other sound are useless for detecting a woman’s invention, or even
for detecting artificiality of language. Phonic and structural preferences are idiosyncratic, and
unique to every invention, and to every natural language. My diachronic study, then, must be
based on similitude and difference rather than on descent, for language invention is constantly
reinventing itself, inspired by various schools of thought in various times and eras. Personal
language invention, whether by men or by women, often develops independently and privately. It
may have done so for who knows how long or in what unrecorded circumstances, so it is only
the published ones that we know of that can be compared to the Ignota Lingua. The technology
of HILDEGARD’S LANGUAGE AS VINEYARD AND EDIFICE 9 the Internet is changing all
that by democratizing publication and opening up closed circles to the world at large. Even so,
modern language inventions, especially those by women and those that exist independently from
written fiction, have been subtly encumbered by the pervasive connection with the nineteenth-
century medium Smith and her “somnambulism” or “dissociative identity disorder,” or the
“unfeminine” acts of female charlatans such as Mary Baker and her pretended identity as
“Princess Caraboo.” This connection exposes a mindset that has looked upon woman and her
linguistic experiments as exotic, mysterious, transgressive, glossolalic, or childlike. It is a topic
that continues to inspire curiosity and sensationalism and has minutely colored reception of
Hildegard’s Lingua. We are still moved by the thrills of the female trance, the mystical
paroxysms and speaking in tongues, the automatic writing, the regressive dreamworld of
linguistic distortion, and the delicious speculation of girlish secrecies and ciphers. Contemporary
fascination with the medieval is often rooted in feminine mystery, what Karma Lochrie calls
“covert operations” in her book by the same name, a study not only of the nature of secrecy and
otherness, but its application to medieval women in their dangerous gossip.20 Nor have we
disentangled our speculations about language innovation from our fascination with mental
illness. Consider the books by scholars on the pathology and infantilism of verbal play. Gilles
Deleuze devotes considerable space in The Logic of Sense to Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau words
and other “nonsense” as these delighted children. In his thirteenth chapter on the “Schizophrenic
and the Little Girl” he expresses his “horror” inspired by the intersection of childish games and
schizophrenia.21 Daniel Heller-Roazen’s recent and well-acclaimed book Echolalias: On the
Forgetting of Language has a chapter entitled “Schizophonetics.”22 Both authors are fascinated
by Louis Wolfson and his autobiography Le Schizo et les langues, wherein he describes his
revulsion of English, his “mother tongue,” and his attempts to forget it. English invaded him in
the way the speech of his despised mother did, and he sought to replace it by foreign
languages.23 While I cannot ignore the darker aspects of language experiment and I will
examine demonic, magic, and faked languages, my book ultimately aims to situate Hildegard’s
Lingua among a tradition of “sane” inventions and unsecretive ones. In this respect it emulates
Lochrie’s comparative strategy of juxtaposing “cultural operations and media” within both the
medieval and the modern.24 The online inventors are decidedly invested in the “logic of sense”
and uninterested in keeping their signifiers secret. They are nonetheless overshadowed by
Tolkien in the eyes of the public. No matter how much more ingenious or inventive their work,
they are to the general critic as Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” was to the poet Artaud: “I never liked
this poem . . . I do 10 HILDEGARD OF BINGEN’S UNKNOWN LANGUAGE not like poems
or languages of the surface which smell of happy leisures and of intellectual success . . . One
may invent one’s language, and make pure language speak with an extra-grammatical or a-
grammatical meaning, but this meaning must have value in itself, that is, it must issue from
torment.”25 In short, insane inventions are interesting because they are tormented and/or secret,
and sane inventions are not. Perhaps in response to this attitude by people who more readily
connect language invention with schizophrenia (or Asberger’s syndrome lately), Tolkien
defended the art in his essay: “The instinct for ‘linguistic invention’—the fitting of notion to oral
symbol, and pleasure in contemplating the new relation established, is rational, and not perverted
. . . We see it in an alloyed form in the peculiar keenness of the delight scholars have in poetry or
fine prose in a foreign language, almost before they have mastered that language.”26 In
Hildegard’s day there was no rival, no sense of vision as pathology or language creation as
child’s play, and no paradigm against which she and her invention could be set except Adam
naming the animals, the Apostles at Pentecost, and the summaria of Latin terms that she may
have contemplated. The one danger was that it could be considered demonic, but Hildegard’s
Lingua with its ordered sequence and translations escaped that identification. In studying
Hildegard and her work, then, I provide a female model that predates Tolkien by eight hundred
years. A woman wracked with pain all her life—and who examined disease and its cures—
reinvented language for spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic purposes wherein illness takes up
only twenty-two entries in her thousand-word list. She thereby gives us a means to examine her
unique project within a long tradition of the rational, open, and especially the “keen delight” of a
personal language. Such a study may make the Lingua seem less unique, but the advantages
outweigh that threat. Hildegard’s Lingua exhibits the delight she took in the renewal, the
“greening power,” of God’s creation, her vivid interest in beautiful sounds and music, and it
shows her involvement in a uniquely human intellectual and creative endeavor that has spanned
centuries. If nomothete or even onomaturge do not suit as terms, I propose a newer neologism
already in use, glossopoeist, a “maker of language.” This book, then, makes Hildegard the center
of a study of language invention over the ages. With the help of the Latin and German glosses, it
edits and translates in full the Riesencodex recension of her Ignota Lingua (assisted by the extra
translations provided by the Berlin MS). Despite the often random quality of her imaginary
words, it focuses on the ordered nature of her prefixes, compounds, and gendered endings. Most
importantly, it investigates the appeal of such a project to a talented, visionary, and verbally
gifted woman by scrutinizing the imaginative experiments of like-minded inventors.