The extent of Old Occitan according to the 12th-centuryCodex Calixtinus
Old Occitan (Modern Occitan:occitan ancian,Catalan:occità antic), also calledOld Provençal, was the earliest form of theOccitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the 8th to the 14th centuries.[1][2] Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is sometimes included in Old Occitan, sometimes in Modern Occitan.[3] As the termoccitanus appeared around the year 1300,[4] Old Occitan is referred to as "Romance" (Occitan:romans) or "Provençal" (Occitan:proensals) in medieval texts.
Gallo-Romance languages. 1. Current limits of the Occitan language 2. Former limits of the Occitan language before the 13th century.
Among the earliest records of Occitan are theTomida femina, theBoecis and theCançó de Santa Fe. Old Occitan, the language used by thetroubadours, was the firstRomance language with a literary corpus and had an enormous influence on the development oflyric poetry in other European languages. Theinterpunct was a feature of its orthography and survives today in Catalan andGascon.
The official language of the sovereign principality of theViscounty of Béarn was the local vernacularBearnès dialect of Old Occitan. It was the spoken language of law courts and of business and it was the written language of customary law. Although vernacular languages were increasingly preferred toLatin in western Europe in the late Middle Ages, the status of Occitan in Béarn was unusual because its use was required by law: "lawyers will draft their petitions and pleas in the vernacular language of the present country, both in speech and in writing".[5]
Old Catalan and Old Occitan diverged between the 11th and the 14th centuries.[6] Catalan never underwent the shift from/u/ to/y/ or the shift from/o/ to/u/ (except in unstressed syllables in some dialects) and so had diverged phonologically before those changes affected Old Occitan.
Written⟨ch⟩ is believed to have represented the affricate[tʃ], but since the spelling often alternates with⟨c⟩, it may also have represented [k] in some cases.
Word-final⟨g⟩ may sometimes represent[tʃ], as ingaug "joy" (also spelledgauch).
Original /u/ (from Latin /uː/) fronted to /y/. When this occurred is unclear: some scholars prefer the tenth or eleventh century, while others favour the thirteenth century. Either way, original /o/ (from Latin /u/ and /oː/) subsequently raised to the vacated position, becoming /u/. Both phonemes maintained their original spelling (⟨u⟩ for /y/, ⟨o⟩ for /u/), although in the fourteenth century an alternative spelling ⟨ou⟩ was also introduced for /u/ under French influence.[8]
The open-mid vowels[ɛ] and[ɔ] variably diphthongized in stressed position when followed by a semivowel or palatalised consonant, and sporadically elsewhere, but retained their value as separate vowel phonemes with minimal pairs such aspèl /pɛl/ "skin" andpel /pel/ "hair".[9]
Old Occitan is a non-standardised language regarding its spelling, meaning that different graphemic signs can represent one sound and vice versa. For example:
It had a two-case system (nominative andoblique), as inOld French, with the oblique derived from the Latin accusative case. The declensional categories were also similar to those of Old French; for example, theLatin third-declension nouns with stress shift between the nominative and accusative were maintained in Old Occitan only in nouns referring to people.
There were two distinct conditional tenses: a "first conditional", similar to the conditional tense in other Romance language, 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 modernGascon.
Bela Domna·l vostre cors gens E·lh vostre bel olh m'an conquis, E·l doutz esgartz e lo clars vis, E·l vostre bels essenhamens, Que, can be m'en pren esmansa, De beutat no·us trob egansa: La genser etz c'om posc'e·l mon chauzir, O no·i vei clar dels olhs ab que·us remir.
Translation:
O pretty lady, all your grace and eyes of beauty conquered me, sweet glance and brightness of your face and all your nature has to tell so if I make an appraisal I find no one like in beauty: most pleasing to be found in all the world or else the eyes I see you with have dimmed.
Frede Jensen.The Syntax of Medieval Occitan, 2nd edn. De Gruyter, 2015 (1st edn. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986). Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 208. 978-3-484-52208-4.
French translation: Frede Jensen.Syntaxe de l'ancien occitan. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994.
William D. Paden.An Introduction to Old Occitan. Modern Language Association of America, 1998.ISBN0-87352-293-1.
Romieu, Maurice; Bianchi, André (2002).Iniciacion a l'occitan ancian / Initiation à l'ancien occitan (in Occitan and French). Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux.ISBN2-86781-275-5.
Povl Skårup.Morphologie élémentaire de l'ancien occitan. Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997,ISBN87-7289-428-8
^Paul Cohen, "Linguistic Politics on the Periphery: Louis XIII, Béarn, and the Making of French as an Official Language in Early Modern France",When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Language Competition, and Language Coexistence (Ohio State University Press, 2003), pp. 165–200.
^Riquer, Martí de,Història de la Literatura Catalana, vol. 1. Barcelona: Edicions Ariel, 1964
^The charts are based on phonologies given in Paden, William D.,An Introduction to Old Occitan, New York 1998
