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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.[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 occitanus appeared around the year 1300,[4] Old Occitan is referred to as "Romance" (Occitan: romans) or "Provençal" (Occitan: proensals) in medieval texts.

Old Occitan
Old Provençal
Region	Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Auvergne, Limousin, Aquitaine, Gascony
Era	8th–14th centuries
Language family	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Romance Italo-Western Western Gallo-Romance Occitano-Romance Old Occitan
Dialects	Occitanic
Language codes
ISO 639-2	pro
ISO 639-3	pro
Glottolog	oldp1253

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 /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.

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	m	n	ɲ
Plosive	p   b	t   d		k   ɡ
Fricative	f   v	s   z
Affricate		ts   dz	tʃ   dʒ
Lateral		l	ʎ
Trill		r
Tap		ɾ

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

Old Occitan vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i   y	u
Close-mid	e	(o)
Open-mid	ɛ	ɔ
Open	a	ɑ

Notes:

• [o] apparently raised to [u] during the 12th and the 13th centuries, but the spelling was unaffected: flor /fluɾ/ "flower".,[8]
• The open-mid vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ] 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".[9]

Diphthongs and triphthongs

Old Occitan diphthongs and triphthongs

IPA	Example	Meaning
falling
/aj/	paire	father
/aw/	autre	other
/uj/	conoiser	to know
/uw/	dous	sweet
/ɔj/	pois	then
/ɔw/	mou	it moves
/ej/	vei	I see
/ew/	beure	to drink
/ɛj/	seis	six
/ɛw/	breu	short
/yj/	cuid	I believe
/iw/	estiu	summer
rising
/jɛ/	miels	better
/wɛ/	cuelh	he receives
/wɔ/	cuolh	he receives
triphthongs stress always falls on middle vowel
/jɛj/	lieis	her
/jɛw/	ieu	I
/wɔj/	nuoit	night
/wɛj/	pueis	then
/wɔw/	uou	egg
/wɛw/	bueu	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][10]

Morphology

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (December 2016)

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 Ab joi mou lo vers e·l comens (c. 1200, translated by James H. Donalson):

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.	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.

See also

• Occitan conjugation
• Occitan phonology

Further reading

• 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. ISBN 0-87352-293-1.
• Romieu, Maurice; Bianchi, André (2002). Iniciacion a l'occitan ancian / Initiation à l'ancien occitan (in Occitan and French). Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. ISBN 2-86781-275-5.
• Povl Skårup. Morphologie élémentaire de l'ancien occitan. Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997, ISBN 87-7289-428-8
• Nathaniel B. Smith & Thomas Goddard Bergin. An Old Provençal Primer. Garland, 1984, ISBN 0-8240-9030-6
• Kathrin Kraller. Sprachgeschichte als Kommunikationsgeschichte: Volkssprachliche Notarurkunden des Mittelalters in ihren Kontexten. Mit einer Analyse der okzitanischen Urkundensprache und der Graphie. Universität Regensburg, 2019, ISBN 978-3-88246-415-3

References

External links

• A site with a presentation of Old Occitan

На других языках

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- [en] Old Occitan

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[fr] Ancien occitan

L’ancien occitan, aussi connu sous le nom de provençal ancien[1], est la langue occitane du Moyen Âge telle qu’elle nous a été transmise par des écrits à partir du XIe siècle jusqu’aux environs de l’année 1500[2].

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[it] Lingua occitana antica

L'occitano antico, o provenzale antico o lingua d'oc (langue d'oc), fu la più antica forma della lingua occitana, della quale si trovano esempi in scritti risalenti dall'VIII al XV secolo[1].

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[ru] Староокситанский язык

Староокситанский язык, также называемый старопровансальским — самая ранняя форма окситано-романских языков. Записи на этом языке датируются VIII—XIV веками[1][2].

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