Old Catalan
| Old Catalan | |
|---|---|
| catalanesch, valencianesch, chrestianesch, lemosin, romançar, romans, romana, esplanar, pla, vulgar, sermo plebeius | |
| Region | Principality of Catalonia, Kingdom of Valencia, Balearic islands, Alghero |
| Era | evolved into Modern Catalan by the 16th century |
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Indo-European
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| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Old Catalan was the Romance variety spoken in territories that spanned roughly the territories of the Principality of Catalonia, the Kingdom of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and the city of Alghero in Sardinia; all of them then part of the Crown of Aragon.
Old Catalan, classified as an Occitano Romance variety, is grouped with Old Occitan or Provençal.
It is believed that Old Catalan had two lateral palatal phonemes. The first,/ʎ/, was written as ⟨ll⟩ and has remained unchanged until recently. The second, reconstructed as /jl/, came from the Latin groups C'L, G'L, LE, and LI; it was written as ⟨yl⟩ and ⟨il⟩. /jl/ never appeared in initial position. This second phoneme has either merged into /ʎ/ in most dialects but into /j/ in a few dialects.
Around the 12th century, word-initial /l/ became /ʎ/, even though it continued to be spelled as ⟨l⟩ until the 15th century.
/v/ began to merge into /b/ in some dialects around the 14th century, a process called betacism. Now, the distinction is maintained only in Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and southern Tarragona.
The system features a modification of the original Proto-Romance /e/ and /ɛ/. First, /e/ was centralized to /ǝ/, and then /ɛ/ was raised to /e/. In Modern Central Catalan, stressed /ǝ/ has been fronted to /ɛ/, thus partially inverting the original Proto-Romance distribution still found in Italian and Portuguese. Balearic varieties still keep stressed /ǝ/.
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