Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/47

 PEOVENQAL LANGUAGE AND LITERATUEE (Lat. hoc), which is the origin also of the mid- dle Latin name Occitania and of the French adjective occitanien, later writers fell into the habit of applying the name of langue floe to the whole Provencal language, while it should be strictly confined to the Occitanian dialect. The middle of the 10th century furnishes the first monument of the Provencal language, but its principal development occurred in the 12th and 13th centuries, the flourishing period of the peculiar poetry of the troubadours. But as early as the middle of the 13th century the language ceased to be used by the higher classes. As the troubadours took particular pains to ridicule the clergy and the practices of the church, they drew upon themselves the ill will of the ecclesiastical party, and in 1245 Innocent IV. issued a bull in which he called Provencal the language of heretics, and for- bade its use by students. The wars which during the early part of the 13th century deso- lated the south of France were also fatal to the language. The troubadours sought refuge at the court of Aragon and in Catalonia, and kept the language for a time from corruption ; but by the beginning of the 14th century Pro- vencal generally succumbed in Spain also to the adjacent dialects. An attempt was made to preserve the language by establishing con- sistories of the " gay science " in Toulouse and Barcelona, but their success was short. In Italy, in the northwest of which it was spoken, it was quickly forgotten on the revival of the ancient literature, and was superseded by Tus- can. The language thus passed into dialects spoken only by the peasantry in its former territory, and its use for poetical composition has come to be only a matter of caprice. Provencal is the earliest Eomance language which received grammatical treatment ; but the object was only to check the carelessness of expression on the part of the poets, and thus to counteract the threatening decadence of the language. Provencal scarcely ever de- veloped into a uniform literary language, as the poets lived at the various courts. But the efforts on the part of the troubadours to attain a certain elegance, ease, and variety of diction, causing them to reject many expressions as inelegant and impure, led to the formation of a choicer language than that used by the masses, which was called lo dreg proensal, or la dreita parladura ; this was not peculiar to any one province, though not without pro- vincialisms. The want of an orthography, and the indefiniteness of the dialectical variations, render it very difficult to determine either the pronunciation or the construction of the language. The grammatical treatises of Uk Faidit and Eaimon Vidal hardly touch upon these subjects. They contain discourses on long and short syllables, and there is an at- tempt to show the difference of pronunciation between French and Provencal. Only the Leys d'amors makes frequent reference to the value of the letters and to orthography. The forms fan and fatz, plai and plats, faire and far, conques and conquis, ditz and di, and the like, are used for the same words by one poet, and the rhymes follow accordingly ; yet such instances cannot be cited to prove that quar (Lat. quare) was pronounced differently from car, or altre otherwise than autre; for quar and altre may have been written according to etymology, while car and autre represented the pronunciation. Accordingly but little is said in modern philological works on Provencal about the pronunciation of it. "When Ray- nouard, the great student of the langue d'oc, was interrogated in regard to it, he replied : II n*y a pas de prononciation provencale (" There is no Provencal pronunciation ") ; and Diez, who has given the fullest treatise on Provencal vowels and consonants, admits that there is a great amount of truth in the reply. The characteristics of the modern Proven- cal dialects are the following. In the New Provencal many words ending in e in French have t, as agi, couragi; au is generally sound- ed oou ; I is changed into u and II (as in fille) into y ; and c before a is sometimes guttural and sometimes palatal. The Occita- nian dialects of Languedoc resemble New Pro- vencal very closely. In Toulouse oi is sound- ed instead of ei ; in Montpellier, io for ue ; the letter I is not always changed into u ; final n, preserved in Montpellier, is dropped in Tou- louse ; Latin ct and di change into ch, and into I. The Limousinian dialect may be di- vided into Upper and Lower Limousinian. In the latter a is generally sounded as o, ai as ei, ieu as iou, ch as ts, j and soft g as dz. In Au- vergne ai becomes one ; oi,'eu ; eu and iu, iau ; final I and n disappear; s, c, and z often be- come palatals; ch is sounded as in French, and final c as t ; I often becomes r. In Dauphiny, especially at Grenoble, the influence of the French pronunciation becomes more apparent, while the Waldensian dialect has experienced some changes through the influence of Italian. In fact, we may doubt whether the latter has been directly derived from Provencal, though the early Waldensian literary monuments be- token a near kinship to it. Gascon still shows its Provencal origin, but it has absorbed so many foreign elements that its parentage is greatly obscured. Prominent among its pe- culiarities are the preceding of r by a, open- ing II for I, internal r for I, ch for and , qua sounded with an audible u, 5 for, and h for f. Catalan is properly not a dialectical variation of Provencal, but rather an indepen- dent idiom closely related to it. Its peculiari- ties are the change of mute e into a ; the pres- ervation of e and o without change into diph- thongs ; the absence of ie, ue, iei, ieu, and the rare use of other diphthongs and triphthongs ; the softening of I into II; the dropping of Latin final n ; the palatal sounds of g, j, and x; ch in the beginning of words for c; the sound of e for c ; and the audible u in qua and gua. Valencian is almost the same as Catalan,