Old Occitan Explained

Old Occitan
Also Known As:	Old Provençal
Region:	Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Auvergne, Limousin, Aquitaine, Gascony
Era:	9th–14th centuries
Familycolor:	Indo-European
Fam2:	Italic
Fam3:	Latino-Faliscan
Fam4:	Latin
Fam5:	Romance
Fam6:	Italo-Western
Fam7:	Western Romance
Fam8:	Gallo-Iberian
Fam9:	Gallo-Romance
Fam10:	Occitano-Romance
Iso2:	pro
Iso3:	pro
Glotto:	oldp1253
Glottorefname:	Old Provençal

Old Occitan (Occitan (post 1500);: occitan ancian|label=[[Occitan language|Modern Occitan]], Catalan; Valencian: 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.^[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 term Latin: occitanus appeared around the year 1300,^[4] Old Occitan is referred to as "Romance" (Occitan: Provençal, Old (to 1500);Occitan, Old (to 1500);: romans) or "Provençal" (Occitan: Provençal, Old (to 1500);Occitan, Old (to 1500);: 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 official language of the sovereign principality of the Viscounty of Béarn was the local vernacular Bearnès 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 to Latin 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 pronounced as //u// to pronounced as //y// or the shift from pronounced as //o// to pronounced as //u// (except in unstressed syllables in some dialects) and so 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

Old Occitan consonants
	Labial	Dental/ alveolar	Postalveolar/ palatal	Velar
Nasal	pronounced as /link/	pronounced as /link/	pronounced as /link/
Plosive	pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/	pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/		pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/
Fricative	pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/	pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/
Affricate		pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/	pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/
Lateral		pronounced as /link/	pronounced as /link/
Trill		pronounced as /link/
Tap		pronounced as /link/

Notes:

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

Vowels

Monophthongs

		Central	Back
Close	pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/		pronounced as /link/
Close-mid	pronounced as /link/		(pronounced as /link/)
Open-mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open		a

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 pronounced as /[ɛ]/ and pronounced as /[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 as pèl /pɛl/ "skin" and pel /pel/ "hair".

Diphthongs and triphthongs

Old Occitan diphthongs and triphthongs
falling
IPA	Example	Meaning
pronounced as //aj//		father
pronounced as //aw//		other
pronounced as //uj//		to know
pronounced as //uw//		sweet
pronounced as //ɔj//		then
pronounced as //ɔw//		it moves
pronounced as //ej//		I see
pronounced as //ew//		to drink
pronounced as //ɛj//		six
pronounced as //ɛw//		short
pronounced as //yj//		I believe
pronounced as //iw//		summer
rising
pronounced as //jɛ//		better
pronounced as //wɛ//		he receives
pronounced as //wɔ//		he receives
triphthongs stress always falls on middle vowel
pronounced as //jɛj//		her
pronounced as //jɛw//		I
pronounced as //wɔj//		night
pronounced as //wɛj//		then
pronounced as //wɔw//		egg
pronounced as //wɛw//		ox

Graphemics

Old Occitan is a non-standardised language regarding its spelling, meaning that different graphemic signs can represent one sound and vice versa. For example:

(l), (lh), or (ll) for [ʎ];
(s), or (ss) for [s];
(z), or (s) for [z];
word-final (g) or (ch) for [tʃ]^[9]

Morphology

Some notable characteristics of Old Occitan:

It 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 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 modern Gascon.

Extracts

From Bertran de Born's Provençal, Old (to 1500);Occitan, Old (to 1500);: Ab joi mou lo vers e·l comens (translated by James H. Donalson):

References

[Rebecca Posner]
Frank M. Chambers, An Introduction to Old Provençal Versification. Diane, 1985
"The Early Occitan period is generally considered to extend from 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,
Smith and Bergin, Old Provençal Primer, p. 2
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.
[Martín de Riquer|Riquer, Martí de]
The charts are based on phonologies given in Paden, William D., An Introduction to Old Occitan, New York 1998
Paden 1998: 100–102
Book: Kraller, Kathrin. Sprachgeschichte als Kommunikationsgeschichte: Volkssprachliche Notarurkunden des Mittelalters in ihren Kontexten. Mit einer Analyse der okzitanischen Urkundensprache und der Graphie.. Universität Regensburg. 2019. 978-3-88246-415-3. Regensburg. 292–341.

External links

A site with a presentation of Old Occitan