Old Occitan

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.^[2][3] Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is sometimes included in Old Occitan, sometimes in Modern Occitan.^[4] As the term occitanus appeared around the year 1300,^[5] Old Occitan is referred to as "Romance" (Occitan: romans) or "Provençal" (Occitan: proensals) in medieval texts.

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.^[6] 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:^[7]

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].

Vowels

Monophthongs

This vowel chart gives a general idea of the vowel space of Old Occitan. It is not meant to be a precise mapping of the tongue positions, which would be impossible to do anyway since there are no native speakers of Old Occitan.

Notes:

• [o] apparently raised to [u] during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but the spelling was unaffected, hence flor /fluɾ/ "flower".^[8]
• The open-mid vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ] appear as allophones of /e/ and /u/ respectively under certain circumstances in stressed syllables.

Diphthongs and triphthongs

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):

See also

• Occitan conjugation
• Occitan phonology

Further reading

• Nathaniel B. Smith, Thomas Goddard Bergin, An Old Provençal primer, Garland, 1984, ISBN 0-8240-9030-6
• Paden, William D. 1998. An Introduction to Old Occitan. Modern Language Association of America. ISBN 0-87352-293-1.
• Povl Skårup, Morphologie élémentaire de l'ancien occitan, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997, ISBN 87-7289-428-8
• Romieu, Maurice; Bianchi, André (2002). Iniciacion a l'occitan ancian / Initiation à l'ancien occitan (in Occitan and French). Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. ISBN 2-86781-275-5. 

References

1. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Old Provençal". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. 
2. ↑ Rebecca Posner, The Romance Languages, Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-521-28139-3
3. ↑ Frank M. Chambers, An Introduction to Old Provençal Versification. Diane, 1985 ISBN 0-87169-167-1
4. ↑ "The Early Occitan period is generally considered to extend from ca. 800 to 1000, Old Occitan from 1000 to 1350, and Middle Occitan from 1350 to 1550" in William W. Kibler, Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, Routledge, 1995, ISBN 0-8240-4444-4
5. ↑ Smith and Bergin, Old Provençal Primer, p. 2
6. ↑ Riquer, Martí de, Història de la Literatura Catalana, vol. 1. Barcelona: Edicions Ariel, 1964
7. ↑ The charts are based on phonologies given in Paden, William D., An Introduction to Old Occitan, New York 1998
8. ↑ See Paden 1998, p. 101

External links

• A site with a presentation of Old Occitan