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Old Occitan

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Era
  
8th–14th centuries

ISO 639-3
  
pro

ISO 639-2
  
pro

Glottolog
  
oldp1253

Region
  
Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Auvergne, Limousin, Aquitaine, Gascony

Language family
  
Indo-European Italic Romance Western Gallo-Romance Occitano-Romance Old Occitan

General introduction


Old Occitan (Modern Occitan: occitan ancian, Catalan: occità antic), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is sometimes included in Old Occitan, sometimes in Modern Occitan. As the term occitanus appeared around the year 1300, Old Occitan is referred to as "Romance" (Occitan: romans) or "Provençal" (Occitan: proensals) in medieval texts.

Contents

History

Among the earliest records of Occitan are the Tomida femina, the Boecis, and the Cançó de Santa Fe. Old Occitan, the language used by the troubadours, was the first Romance language with a literary corpus and had an enormous influence on the development of lyric poetry in other European languages. The interpunct was a feature of its orthography, and survives today in Catalan and Gascon.

The Old Catalan language diverged from Old Occitan between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Early texts in the Catalan dialect are the Homilies d'Organyà, Cançó de Santa Fe and the Greuges de Guitard Isarn. Catalan never underwent the shift from /u/ to /y/ or the shift from /o/ to /u/ (except in unstressed syllables in some dialects) so it had diverged phonologically before those changes affected Old Occitan.

Phonology

Old Occitan changed and evolved somewhat during its history, but the basic sound system can be summarised as follows:

Consonants

Notes:

  • Written ⟨ch⟩ is believed to have represented the affricate [tʃ]; but, since the spelling often alternates with ⟨c⟩, it may also have represented [k].
  • Word-final ⟨g⟩ may sometimes represent [tʃ], as in gaug "joy" (also spelled gauch).
  • Intervocalic ⟨z⟩ could represent either [z] or [dz].
  • Written ⟨j⟩ could represent either [dʒ] or [j].

    • Monophthongs

    Notes:

  • [o] apparently raised to [u] during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but the spelling was unaffected, hence flor /fluɾ/ "flower".
  • The open-mid vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ] appear as allophones of /e/ and /u/ respectively under certain circumstances in stressed syllables.

    • Morphology

    Some notable characteristics of Old Occitan:

  • The language had a two-case system (nominative and oblique), as in Old French, with the oblique derived from the Latin accusative case. The declensional categories were also similar to those of Old French; for example, the Latin third-declension nouns with stress shift between the nominative and accusative were continued in Old Occitan only in nouns referring to people.
  • There were two distinct conditional tenses, a "first conditional" that was similar to the conditional tense in other Romance languages and a "second conditional" derived from the Latin pluperfect indicative tense. The second conditional is cognate with the literary pluperfect in Portuguese, the -ra imperfect subjunctive in Spanish, the second preterite of very early Old French (Sequence of Saint Eulalia), and probably the future perfect in modern Gascon.

    • Extracts

  • From Bertran de Born's Ab joi mou lo vers e·l comens (ca. 1200, translated by James H. Donalson):

    • References

    Old Occitan Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA