Old Occitan ( oc, occitan ancian, label= Modern Occitan, ca, occità antic), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the

Occitano-Romance languages The Occitano-Romance or Gallo-Narbonnese ( ca, llengües occitanoromàniques; oc, lengas occitanoromanicas), or rarely East Iberian, is a branch of the Romance language group that encompasses the Catalan/Valencian and Occitan languages spoken i ...

, 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 ' 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 ''Tomida femina'' (, ; "A swollen woman") is the earliest surviving poem in Occitan, a sixteen-line charm probably for the use of midwives. It is preserved in the left and bottom margins of a Latin legal treatise in a ninth- or tenth-century manus ...

'', the ''

Boecis The ''Boecis'' (original name: ''Lo poema de Boecis'', , ; "The poem of Boethius") is an anonymous fragment written around the year 1000 CE in the Limousin dialect of Old Occitan, currently spoken only in southern France. Of the possibly hund ...

'' and the ''

Cançó de Santa Fe The ''Cançó'' (or ''Cançon'') ''de Santa Fe'' (, ; french: Chanson de Sainte Foi d'Agen, en, Song of Saint Fides), a hagiographical poem about Saint Faith, is an early surviving written work in Old Occitan and has been proposed to be the earlie ...

''. Old Occitan, the language used by the

troubadours A troubadour (, ; oc, trobador ) 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 troubadour is usually called a ''trobairit ...

, was the first

Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European languages, I ...

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. It is not equivalent to song lyrics, though song lyrics are often in the lyric mode, and it is also ''not'' equi ...

in other European languages. The

interpunct An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot and centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script. (Word-separating spaces did no ...

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 ( oc, Bearn, label= Gascon or ) was a medieval lordship in the far south of France, part of the Duchy of Gascony from the late ninth century. In 1347, the viscount declared Béarn an independent princip ...

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 branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

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 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, the Balearic Islands, and the isl ...

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

Notes: * apparently raised to during the 12th and the 13th centuries, but the spelling was unaffected: ''

flor Flor (Spanish and Portuguese for ''flower'') in winemaking, is a film of yeast on the surface of wine, important in the manufacture of some styles of sherry. The flor is formed naturally under certain winemaking conditions, from indigenous yeast ...

'' "flower"., * The open-mid vowels and diphthongized in stressed position when followed by a semivowel, 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 Engl ...

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 b ...

), as in

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...

, with the oblique derived from the

accusative case The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...

. 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 The ''Sequence of Saint Eulalia'', also known as the ''Canticle of Saint Eulalia'' (french: Séquence/Cantilène de sainte Eulalie) is the earliest surviving piece of French hagiography and one of the earliest extant texts in the vernacular langu ...

) 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 wa ...

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

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