Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/371

 CATALAN.] SPAIN 347 Latin tongue in Spain, and the formation of the three linguistic types just enumerated, were promoted by the peculiar political circumstances. From the 9th century onwards Spain was slowly recaptured from the Moham- medans, and the Latin spoken by the Christians who had taken refuge on the slopes of the Pyrenees was slowly carried back to the centre and ultimately to the south of the Peninsula, whence it had been driven by the Arab invasion. Mediaeval Spain divides itself into three con- fjuififas that of Castile (much the most considerable), that of Portugal, and that of Aragon ; and to these three political conquests correspond an equal number of linguistic varieties. If a given province now speaks Catalan rather than Castilian, the explanation is to be sought simply and solely in the fact that it was conquered by a king of Aragon and peopled by his Catalan subjects. I. CATALAN. This domain now embraces, on the main- land, the Spanish provinces of Gerona, Barcelona, Tarragona, and Lerida (the old principality of Catalonia), and of Cas- tellon de la Plana, Valencia, and Alicante (the old kingdom of Valencia), and, in the Mediterranean, that of the Balearic Islands (the old kingdom of Majorca). Catalan, by its most characteristic features, belongs to the Romance of southern France and not to that of Spain ; it is legitimate, therefore, to regard it as imported into Spain by those Hispani whom the Arab conquest had driven back beyond the mountains into Languedoc, and who in the 9th century regained the country of their origin ; this conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the dialect is also that of two French provinces on the north of the Pyrenees Roussillon and Cerdagne. From the 9th to the 12th century Catalan spread further and further within the limits of Catalonia, properly so called; in 1229 it was brought to Majorca by Jaime el Conquistador, and in 1238 the same sovereign carried it to Valencia also. Even Murcia was peopled by Catalans in 1266, but this province really is part of the Castilian conquest, and accordingly the Castilian element took the upper hand and absorbed the dialect of the earlier colonists. The river Segura, which falls into the Mediter- ranean in the neighbourhood of Orihuela, a little to the north of Murcia, is as nearly as possible the southern boundary of- the Catalan domain ; westward the boundary coincides pretty exactly with the political frontier, the provinces of New Castile and Aragon not being at all encroached on. Catalan, which by the reunion of Aragon and the countship of Barcelona in 1137 became the official language of the Aragonese monarchy, although the king- dom of Aragon, consisting of the present provinces of Saragossa, Huesca, and Teruel, has always been Castilian in speech, established a footing in Italy also, in all parts where the domination of the kings of Aragon extended, viz., in Sicily, Naples, Corsica, and Sardinia, but it has not maintained itself there in modern times except in a single district of the last-named island (Alghero) ; every- where else in Italy, where it was not spoken except by the conquerors, nor written except in the royal chancery, it has disappeared without leaving a trace. From the 13th century the name given to the vulgar tongue of eastern Spain has been Catalanesch (Cata- laniscus) or Catald (Catalamis), the idiom of the Cata- lans. 1 By Catalanesch or Catald was understood, essen- tially, the spoken language and the language of prose, while that of poetry, with a large admixture of Provencal forms, was early called Lemosi, Limosi, or language of Limousin, Catalan grammarians, and particularly the most celebrated of them, Ramon Vidal de Besahi, having adopted Lemosi as the generic name of the language of the troubadours. These grammarians carefully distinguish the vulgar speech, or pla Catald, from the refined trolar 1 The origin of the name Catalanus is unknown. idiom, which originally is simply a- more or less modified form of Provencal. Afterwards, and especially in these parts of the Catalan domain outside of Catalonia which did not care to acknowledge that they derived their language from that province, Lemosi received a more extensive signification, so as to mean the literary language in general, whether of verse or of prose. To this hour, particularly in Valencia and the Balearics, Lemosi is em- ployed to designate on the one hand the old Catalan and on the other the very artificial and somewhat archaizing idiom which is current in the " jochs florals"; while the spoken dialect is called, according to the localities, Valencia (in Valencia), Majorqui and Jfenorqui (in Majorca and Minorca), or Catald (in Catalonia); the form Cata- lanesch is obsolete. The principal features which connect Catalan with the Romance of France and separate it from that of Spain are the following. (1) To take first its treatment of the final vowels, Catalan, like French and Provencal, having only oxytones and paroxytones, does not tolerate more than one syllable after the tonic accent : thus anima gives arma, camera gives cambra. All the proparoxytones of modern Catalan are of recent introduction and due to Castilian influence. Further, the only post-tonic Latin vowel pre- served by the Catalan is, as in Gallo -Roman, a : mare gives ma); gratii(s) gives grat, but anima gives arma ; and, when the word terminates in a group of consonants requir- ing a supporting vowel, that vowel is represented by an e : arb(o)rem, Cat. abre (Prov. and Fr. ai-bre, but Cast, drbol) ; pop(u)l(us), Cat. poble (Prov. poble, Fr. peuple, but Cast. pueblo) ; sometimes, when it is inserted between the two consonants instead of being made to follow them, the supporting vowel is represented by an o : escdndol (scandalum), frevol (frivolus), clrcol (circulus). In some cases a post-tonic vowel other than a is preserved in Catalan, as, for example, when that vowel forms a diphthong with the tonic (Deu, Deus; Elriu, Hebreus); or, again, it sometimes happens, when the tonic is followed by an i in hiatus, that the i persists (diliivi, diluvium ; servid, servicium ; Idbi, labium; ciri, cereus) ; but in many cases these ought to be regarded as learned forms, as is shown by the existence of parallel ones, such as servey, where the atonic i has been attracted by the tonic and forms a diphthong with it (servici, servii, servey). What has just been said as to the treatment of the final vowels in Catalan must be understood as applying only to pure Catalan, unaltered by the predominance of the Castilian, for the actual language'is no longer faithful to the principle we have laid down ; it allows the final o atonic in a number of substantives and adjectives, and in the verb it now con- jugates canto, temo, sento, a thing unknown in the ancient language. (2) As regards conjugation, only two points need be taken up here : (a) it employs the form known as the inchoative, that is to say, the lengthening of the radical of the present in verbs of the third conjugation by means of the syllable ex or ix, a proceeding common to Italian, Walachian, Provencal, and French, but altogether unknown in Hispanic Romance ; (b) the formation of a great number of past participles in which the termination is added, as in Provengal, not to the radical of the verb, but to that of the perfect : tingut formed from tinch, pogut from poch, conegut from conech, while Castilian says taiido (formerly also tenudo), podido, conocido, that is to say, it forms those participles from the infinitive. As for features common alike to Catalan and Hispanic (Castilian and Portuguese) Romance, on the other hand, and which are unknown to French Romance, there is only one which possesses any importance, the conservation, namely, of the Latin u with its original sound, while the same vowel has assumed in French and Provencal, from a