Old Occitan, 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. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is sometimes included in Old Occitan, sometimes in Modern Occitan. As the term occitanus appeared around the year 1300, Old Occitan is referred to as "Romance" or "Provençal" 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. Old Catalan and Old Occitan diverged between the 11th and the 14th centuries. Catalan never underwent the shift from to or the shift from to 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 .
apparently raised to during the 12th and the 13th centuries, but the spelling was unaffected: "flower".,
The open-mid vowels and appear as allophones of and, respectively, under certain circumstances in stressed syllables.
Diphthongs and triphthongs
Morphology
Some notable characteristics of Old Occitan:
It had a two-case system, as in Old French, with the oblique derived from the Latinaccusative 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 and probably the future perfect in modern Gascon.
Extracts
From Bertran de Born's Ab joi mou lo vers e·l comens :
