Page:A translation of the Latin works of Dante Alighieri.djvu/43

24 inaptly called Spaniards, since a dialect of the language we now call Provençal prevailed over the whole of Aragon and Catalonia; while the Kings of Aragon were, after the downfall of the Counts of Toulouse (1249), the representative princes of the language of oc. In the same way the troubadour Albert of Sisteron (c. 1220) refers to the speakers of the language of oc as Catalans. Compare below, II. 12: 20.

50. The specimen words here chosen represent the most important notions (God, heaven, love, sea, earth, being, living, dying, loving). Dante rightly argues that the fact that ‘almost all’ the words in the languages of oc, oïl, and sì are forms of the same Latin originals proves the common origin of these languages, though his theory of the conventional origin of Latin, the literary language (see below, I. 9: 93 ff.) prevents him from drawing the inference that they are derived from Latin. In fact, on his hypothesis, the vulgar tongue must have preceded the literary language. 61, 62. The statement that the mountains of Aragon formed part of the west boundary of the language of oïl is puzzling. Orosius (Hist. I. 2), who was much relied on by Dante (see Moore, Studies in Dante, 3rd series, p. 110), says that Gallia Narbonensis (which comprised the territory of the medival countships of Provence and Toulouse) was bounded on the west by Spain; and in the map of Marino Sanuto (reproduced in Beazley's Prince Henry the Navigator), which is about contemporary with this treatise, the Iberian Peninsula is twisted round northward in such a way that the east coast of Spain is made to run parallel with the north coast of Africa! and consequently the line of the Pyrenees (which, however, are not marked) would actually form the west boundary of Southern France. But even assuming that the ‘mountains of Aragon’ = the Pyrenees, and that Dante shared an opinion prevalent in his time that the Pyrenees stretched from north to south instead of from east to west, it is further necessary to assume, in order to explain this passage as it stands, that Dante supposed the Pyrenees to extend so far north as to form part of