Old Occitan

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.

Old Occitan changed and evolved somewhat during its history, but the basic sound system can be summarised as follows:[7]

Monophthongs

This vowel chart gives a general idea of the vowel space of Old Occitan. It is not meant to be a precise mapping of the tongue positions, which would be impossible anyway since there are no native speakers of Old Occitan.

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] appear as allophones of /e/ and /u/, respectively, under certain circumstances in stressed syllables.

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

• „ll“, „l“, „lh“ for [ʎ];
• „s“, „ss“ for [s];
• „z“, „s“ for [z];
• „-g“ und „-ch“ at the end of a word for [tʃ][9]

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.

• From Bertran de Born's Ab joi mou lo vers e·l comens (c. 1200, translated by James H. Donalson):

• Occitan conjugation
• Occitan phonology

• 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

• A site with a presentation of Old Occitan