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Old Occitan

Old Occitan
Old Provençal
Region Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Auvergne, Limousin, Aquitaine, Gascony
Era 8th–14th centuries
Language codes
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3
Glottolog oldp1253

Old Occitan (Modern Occitan: occitan ancian, Catalan: occità antic), 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" (Occitan: romans) or "Provençal" (Occitan: proensals) in medieval texts.

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.

The Old Catalan language diverged from Old Occitan between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Early texts in the Catalan dialect are the Homilies d'Organyà, Cançó de Santa Fe and the Greuges de Guitard Isarn. Catalan never underwent the shift from /u/ to /y/ or the shift from /o/ to /u/ (except in unstressed syllables in some dialects) so it had diverged phonologically before those changes affected Old Occitan.


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