Old Occitan (, ), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the

Occitano-Romance languages Occitano-Romance (; ; ) is a branch of the Romance language group that encompasses the Catalan/Valencian, Occitan languages and sometimes Aragonese, spoken in parts of southern France and northeastern Spain. The classification of Occitano-Ro ...

, as attested in writings dating from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is sometimes included in Old Occitan, sometimes in Modern Occitan. As the term ' appeared around the year 1300, Old Occitan is referred to as "Romance" (Occitan: ') or "Provençal" (Occitan: ') 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 A troubadour (, ; ) was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word ''troubadour'' is etymologically masculine, a female equivalent is usually called a ''trobairitz''. The tro ...

, was the first

Romance language The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

with a literary corpus and had an enormous influence on the development of

lyric poetry Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person. The term for both modern lyric poetry and modern song lyrics derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature, t ...

in other European languages. The

interpunct An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. ( Word-separating spaces did not appe ...

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 The Viscounty, later Principality of Béarn ( or ), was a Middle Ages, medieval lordship in the far south of Kingdom of France, France, part of the Duchy of Gascony from the late ninth century. In 1347, the viscount declared Béarn an independent ...

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 Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

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".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.

Old Catalan Old Catalan, also known as Medieval Catalan, is the modern denomination for Romance varieties that during the Middle Ages were spoken in territories that spanned roughly the territories of the Principality of Catalonia, the Kingdom of Valencia, ...

and Old Occitan diverged between the 11th and the 14th centuries. Catalan never underwent the shift from to or the shift from to (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:

Consonants

Notes: *Written is believed to have represented the affricate , but since the spelling often alternates with , it may also have represented in some cases. *Word-final may sometimes represent , as in '' gaug'' "joy" (also spelled ''gauch''). *Intervocalic could represent either or . *Written could represent either or .

Vowels

Monophthongs

* 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. * The open-mid vowels and 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

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: *, , or for � *, or for *, or for *word-final or for ʃref>

Morphology

Some notable characteristics of Old Occitan: * It had a two-case system (

nominative In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants of E ...

and

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) *Oblique angle, in geometry * Oblique triangle, in geometry * Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the ...

), as in

Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th [2-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ...

, 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 Bertran de Born (; 1140s – by 1215) was a baron from the Limousin in France, and one of the major Occitan troubadours of the 12th-13th century. He composed love songs (cansos) but was better known for his political songs (sirventes). He ...

's ' (, translated by James H. Donalson):

Notes

References

External links

A site with a presentation of Old Occitan
{{Authority control Occitan language Romance languages Occitan, Old Old Occitan literature Languages attested from the 8th century