Hildegard of Bingen, also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history. She has been considered by a number of scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
An international auxiliary language is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a foreign language and often a constructed language. The concept is related to but separate from the idea of a lingua franca that people must use to communicate. The study of international auxiliary languages is interlinguistics.
A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language into another language, through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything.
Sango is the primary language spoken in the Central African Republic and also the co-official language of the country. It is used as a lingua franca across the country and had 450,000 native speakers in 1988. It also has 1.6 million second language speakers.
A constructed writing system or a neography is a writing system specifically created by an individual or group, rather than having evolved as part of a language or culture like a natural script. Some are designed for use with constructed languages, although several of them are used in linguistic experimentation or for other more practical ends in existing languages. Prominent examples of constructed scripts include Korean Hangul and Tengwar.
A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal or interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different.
Judeo-Italian is an endangered Jewish language, with only about 200 speakers in Italy and 250 total speakers today. The language is one of the Italian languages and one of the Jewish Romance Languages. Some words have Italian prefixes and suffixes added to Hebrew words as well as Aramaic, roots. All of the language's dialects except one are now extinct.
Late Latin is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the 3rd to the 6th centuries CE, and continuing into the 7th century in the Iberian Peninsula. This somewhat ambiguously defined version of Latin was used between the eras of Classical Latin and Medieval Latin. Scholars do not agree exactly when Classical Latin should end or Medieval Latin should begin.
Frahang-ī Pahlavīg is the title of an anonymous dictionary of mostly Aramaic logograms with Middle Persian translations and transliterations. Its date is unknown.
Eduard Sievers was a German philologist of the classical and Germanic languages. Sievers was one of the Junggrammatiker of the so-called "Leipzig School". He was one of the most influential historical linguists of the late nineteenth century. He is known for his recovery of the poetic traditions of Germanic languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Old Saxon, as well as for his discovery of Sievers' law.
Kassel conversations is the conventional name of an early medieval text preserved in a manuscript from c. 810. It is held today in the university library of Kassel, Germany. It contains several parts, among them an Exhortatio ad plebem christianam, an instructional theological text in Latin. The part that has been of most interest for modern scholarship is that of the so-called Kassel glosses, one of the earliest written documents of the Old High German language.
In Biblical studies, a gloss or glossa is an annotation written on margins or within the text of biblical manuscripts or printed editions of the scriptures. With regard to the Hebrew texts, the glosses chiefly contained explanations of purely verbal difficulties of the text; some of these glosses are of importance for the correct reading or understanding of the original Hebrew, while nearly all have contributed to its uniform transmission since the 11th century. Later on, Christian glosses also contained scriptural commentaries; St. Jerome extensively used glosses in the process of translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible.
A constructed language is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial, planned or invented language, or a fictional language. Planned languages are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning.
Kēlen is a constructed language created by Sylvia Sotomayor in 1998. The language is designed to be a truly alien language by violating a key linguistic universal — namely that all human languages have verbs. In Kēlen, relationships between noun phrases making up the sentence are expressed by one of four relationals. According to Sotomayor, these relationals perform the functions of verbs but lack any of the semantic content. However, the semantic content found in common verbs, such as those that are semantic primes, can also be found in Kēlen's relationals, which calls into question whether Kēlen is technically verbless. Despite its distinctive grammar, Kēlen is an expressive and intelligible language. Texts written in Kēlen have been translated into other languages by several people other than the creator of the language. In an interview, Sotomayor stated that she aimed for Kēlen to be naturalistic apart from its verblessness, and that to achieve this she employs the principle "change one thing and keep everything else the same".
Ignota means "unknown", in the feminine form, in Latin, and is used in some contexts when the name of a person is unknown. It may refer to:
Beverly Mayne Kienzle retired in 2015 as the John H. Morison Professor of the Practice in Latin and Romance Languages at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. She is a specialist in Christian Latin, Latin paleography, and medieval Christianity. She has published over seventy articles and fifteen books, including five on Hildegard of Bingen. Her latest book is an authoritative biography of her grandmother, Virginia Cary Hudson, author of the best-selling O Ye Jigs and Juleps!.
Moselle Romance is an extinct Gallo-Romance dialect that developed after the fall of the Roman Empire along the Moselle river in modern-day Germany, near the border with France. It was part of a wider group of Romance relic areas within the German-speaking territory. Despite heavy Germanic influence, it persisted in isolated pockets until at least the 11th century.
Clementia Killewald OSB was a German Benedictine nun at Eibingen Abbey. She served first as an organist, then took care of the elderly and sick, and finally from 2000 she served as abbess. She introduced the life and work of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, the founder of the abbeys of Rupertsberg and Eibingen, during the 2012 ceremony when Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed Hildegard a Doctor of the Church.
Kristin Hayter is an American singer and pianist. She started releasing music in 2017 and performed under the Latin name Lingua Ignota. In 2023, citing the unhealthiness of reliving her trauma through her performances, Hayter retired the Lingua Ignota project. She embodied a new persona under the moniker, Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.
The Vocabularium Cornicum, also known as the Cottonian Vocabulary or the Old Cornish Vocabulary, is a Latin-Old Cornish glossary. It is usually interpreted as an Old Cornish translation of Ælfric of Eynsham's Latin-Old English Glossary, and it is considered to be the most substantial extant document of the Old Cornish period. The only surviving copy, part of a composite manuscript known as MS Cotton Vespasian A. XIV, is now kept in the British Library, and is thought to have been copied around 1200 AD from an earlier exemplar.
