Frederic Mistral Part 2

[Footnote 2: _Histoire du Felibrige, par_ G. Jourdanne, _Librairie Roumanille, Avignon, 1897_.]

[Footnote 3: The stem of the cup has the form of a palm tree, under which two female figures, representing Catalonia and Provence, stand in a graceful embrace. Below the figures are engraved the two following inscriptions:--

Morta la diuhen qu'es, Ah! se me sabien entendre!

Mes jo la crech viva. Ah! se me voulien segui!

(V. Balaguer.) (F. Mistral.)

(They say she is dead, (Ah, if they could understand but I believe she me! Ah, if they would follow lives.) me!) ]

[Footnote 4: In 1899, Felix Gras published a novel called _The White Terror_. His death occurred early in 1901.]

CHAPTER III

THE MODERN PROVENcAL LANGUAGE

The language of the Felibres is based upon the dialect spoken in the plain of Maillane, in and about the town of Saint-Remy. This dialect is one of the numerous divisions of the _langue d'oc_, which Mistral claims is spoken by nearly twelve millions of people. The literary history of these patois has been written by B. Noulet, and shows that at the close of the terrible struggles of the Albigenses the language seemed dead. In 1324 seven poets attempted to found at Toulouse the compet.i.tions of the _Gai Savoir_, and so to revive the ancient poetry and the ancient language. Their attempt failed. There was literary production of varying degree of merit throughout two or three centuries; but until the time of Jasmin no writer attracted any attention beyond his immediate vicinity; and it is significant that the Felibres themselves were long in ignorance of Jasmin. It is then not difficult to demonstrate that the Felibrige revival bears more the character of a creation than of an evolution. It is not at all an evolution of the literature of the Troubadours; it is in no way like it. The language of the Felibres is not even the descendant of the special dialect that dominated as a literary language in the days of the Troubadours; for it was the speech of Limousin that formed the basis of that language, and only two of the greater poets among the Troubadours, Raimond de Vaqueiras and Fouquet de Ma.r.s.eille, were natives of Provence proper.

The dialect of Saint-Remy is simply one of countless ramifications of the dialects descended from the Latin. Mistral and his a.s.sociates have made their literary language out of this dialect as they found it, and not out of the language of the Troubadours. They have regularized the spelling, and have deliberately eliminated as far as possible words and forms that appeared to them to be due to French influence, subst.i.tuting older and more genuine forms--forms that appeared more in accord with the genius of the _langue d'oc_ as contrasted with the _langue d'oil_.

Thus, _glri_, _istri_, _paire_, replace _gloaro_, _istouero_, _pero_, which are often heard among the people. This was the first step. The second step taken arose from the necessity of making this speech of the illiterate capable of elevated expression. Mistral claims to have used no word unknown to the people or unintelligible to them, with the exception that he has used freely of the stock of learned words common to the whole Romance family of languages. These words, too, he transforms more or less, keeping them in harmony with the forms peculiar to the _langue d'oc_. Hence, it is true that the language of the Felibres is a conventional, literary language, that does not represent exactly the speech of any section of France, and is related to the popular speech more or less as any official language is to the dialects that underlie it. As the Felibres themselves have received all their instruction and literary culture in the French language, they use it among themselves, and their prose especially shows the influence of the French to the extent that it may be said that the Provencal sentence, in prose, appears to be a word-for-word translation of an underlying French sentence.

Phonetically, the dialect offers certain marked differences when contrasted with French. First of all is the forceful utterance of the stressed syllable; the Provencal has post-tonic syllables, unlike the sister-speech. Here it may be said to occupy a sort of middle position between Italian and Spanish on the one hand, and French on the other; for in the former languages the accent is found in all parts of the word, in French practically only upon the final, and then it is generally weak, so that the notion of a stress is almost lost. The stress in Provencal is placed upon one of the last two syllables only, and only three vowels, _e_, _i_, _o_, may follow the tonic syllable. The language, therefore, has a cadence that affects the ear differently from the French, and that resembles more that of the Italian or Spanish languages.

The nasal vowels are again unlike those of the French language. The vowel affected by the following nasal consonant preserves its own quality of sound, and the consonant is p.r.o.nounced; at the end of a word both _m_ and _n_ are p.r.o.nounced as _ng_ in the English word _ring_. The Provencal utterance of _matin_, _tems_, is therefore quite unlike that of the French _matin_, _temps_. This change of the nasal consonants into the _ng_ sound whenever they become final occurs also in the dialects of northern Italy and northern Spain. This p.r.o.nunciation of the nasal vowels in French is, as is well known, an important factor in the famous "accent du Midi."

The oral vowels are in general like the French. It is curious that the close _o_ is heard only in the infrequent diphthong _ou_, or as an obscured, unaccented final. This absence of the close _o_ in the modern language has led Mistral to believe that the close _o_ of Old Provencal was p.r.o.nounced like _ou_ in the modern dialect, which regularly represents it. A second element of the "accent du Midi" just referred to is the subst.i.tution of an open for a close _o_. The vowel sound of the word _peur_ is not distinguished from the close sound in _peu_. In the orthography of the Felibres the diagraph _ue_ is used as we find it in Old French to represent this vowel. Probably the most striking feature of the p.r.o.nunciation is the unusual number of diphthongs and triphthongs, both ascending and descending. Each vowel preserves its proper sound, and the component vowels seem to be p.r.o.nounced more slowly and separately than in many languages. It is to be noted that _u_ in a diphthong has the Italian sound, whereas when single it sounds as in French. The unmarked _e_ represents the French _e_, as the _e_ mute is unknown to the Provencal.

The _c_ has come to sound like _s_ before _e_ and _i_, as in French.

_Ch_ and _j_ represent the sounds _ts_ and _dz_ respectively, and _g_ before _e_ and _i_ has the latter sound. There is no aspirate _h_. The _r_ is generally uvular. The _s_ between vowels is voiced. Only _l_, _r_, _s_, and _n_ are p.r.o.nounced as final consonants, _l_ being extremely rare. Mistral has preserved or restored other final consonants in order to show the etymology, but they are silent except in _liaison_ in the elevated style of reading.

The language is richer in vowel variety than Italian or Spanish, and the proportion of vowel to consonant probably greater than in either.

Fortunately for the student, the spelling represents the p.r.o.nunciation very faithfully. A final consonant preceded by another is mute; among single final consonants only _l_, _m_, _n_, _r_, _s_ are sounded; otherwise all the letters written are p.r.o.nounced. The stressed syllable is indicated, when not normal, by the application of practically the same principles that determine the marking of the accent in Spanish.

The p.r.o.nunciation of the Felibres is heard among the people at Maillane and round about. Variations begin as near as Avignon.[5]

Koschwitz' Grammar treats the language historically, and renders unnecessary here the presentation of more than its most striking peculiarities. Of these, one that evokes surprise upon first acquaintance with the dialect is the fact that final _o_ marks the feminine of nouns, adjectives, and participles. It is a close _o_, somewhat weakly and obscurely p.r.o.nounced, as compared, for instance, with the final _o_ in Italian. In this respect Provencal is quite anomalous among Romance languages. In some regions of the Alps, at Nice, at Montpellier, at Le Velay, in Haute-Auvergne, in Roussillon, and in Catalonia the Latin final _a_ is preserved, as in Italian and Spanish.

The noun has but one form for the singular and plural. The distinction of plural and singular depends upon the article, or upon the demonstrative or possessive adjective accompanying the noun. In _liaison_ adjectives take _s_ as a plural sign. So that, for the ear, the Provencal and French languages are quite alike in regard to this matter. The Provencal has not even the formal distinction of the nouns in _al_, which in French make their plural in _aux_. _Cheval_ in Provencal is _chivau_, and the plural is like the singular. A curious fact is the use of _uni_ or _unis_, the plural of the indefinite article, as a sign of the dual number; and this is its exclusive use.

The subject p.r.o.noun, when unemphatic, is not expressed, but understood from the termination of the verb. _Ieu_ (je), _tu_ (tu), and _eu_ (il) are used as disjunctive forms, in contrast with the French. The possessive adjective _leur_ is represented by _si_; and the reflective _se_ is used for the first plural as well as for the third singular and third plural.

The moods and tenses correspond exactly to those of the French, and the famous rule of the past participle is identical with the one that prevails in the sister language.

Aside from the omission of the p.r.o.noun subject, and the use of one or two constructions not unknown to French, but not admitted to use in the literary language, the syntax of the Provencal is identical with that of the French. The inversions of poetry may disguise this fact a little, but the lack of individuality in the sentence construction is obvious in prose. Translation of Provencal prose into French prose is practically mere word subst.i.tution.

Instances of the constructions just mentioned are the following. The relative object p.r.o.noun is often repeated as a personal p.r.o.noun, so that the verb has its _object_ expressed twice. The French continually offers redundancy of subject or complement, but not with the relative.

"Estre, ieu, lou marran que touti L'estrangisson!

Estre, ieu, l'estrangie que touti LOU fugisson!"

"etre, moi, le paria, que tous rebutent!

etre, moi, l'etranger que tout le monde fuit!"

(_La Reino Jano_, Act I, Scene III.)

The particle _ti_ is added to a verb to make it interrogative.

E.g. soun-ti? sont-ils? Petrarco ignoro-ti?

ero-ti? etait-il? Petrarque ignore-t-il?

This is the regular form of interrogative in the third person. It is, of course, entirely due to the influence of colloquial French.

The French indefinite statement with the p.r.o.noun _on_ may be represented in Provencal by the third plural of the verb; _on m'a demande_ is translated _m'an demanda_, or _on m'a demanda_.

The negative _ne_ is often suppressed, even with the correlative _que_.

The verb _estre_ is conjugated with itself, as in Italian.

The Provencal speech is, therefore, not at all what it would have been if it had had an independent literary existence since the days of the Troubadours. The influence of the French has been overwhelming, as is naturally to be expected. A great number of idioms, that seem to be pure gallicisms, are found, in spite of the deliberate effort, referred to above, to eliminate French forms. In _La Reino Jano_, Act III, Scene IV, we find _Ie vai de nstis os_,--_Il y va de nos os_. _Vejan_, _voyons_, is used as a sort of interjection, as in French. The part.i.tive article is used precisely as in French. We meet the narrative infinitive with _de_. In short, the French reader feels at home in the Provencal sentence; it is the same syntax and, to a great degree, the same rhetoric. Only in the vocabulary does he feel himself in a strange atmosphere.

The strength, the originality, the true _raison d'etre_ of the Provencal speech resides in its rich vocabulary. It contains a great number of terms denoting objects known exclusively in Provence, for which there is no corresponding term in the sister speech. Many plants have simple, familiar names, for which the French must subst.i.tute a name that is either only approximate, or learned and pedantic. Words of every category exist to express usages that are exclusively Provencal.

The study of the modern language confirms the results, as regards etymology, reached by Diez and Fauriel and others, who have busied themselves with the Old Provencal. The great ma.s.s of the words are traceable to Latin etyma, as in all Romance dialects a large portion of Germanic words are found. Greek and Arabic words are comparatively numerous. Basque and Celtic have contributed various elements, and, as in French, there is a long list of words the origin of which is undetermined.

The language shares with the other southern Romance languages a fondness for diminutives, augmentatives, and pejoratives, and is far richer than French in terminations of these cla.s.ses. Long suffixes abound, and the style becomes, in consequence, frequently high-sounding and exaggerated.

One of the most evident sources of new words in the language of Mistral is in its suffixes. Most of these are common to the other Romance languages, and have merely undergone the phonetic changes that obtain in this form of speech. In many instances, however, they differ in meaning and in application from their corresponding forms in the sister languages, and a vast number of words are found the formation of which is peculiar to the language under consideration. These suffixes contribute largely to give the language its external appearance; and while a thorough and scientific study of them cannot be given here, enough will be presented to show some of the special developments of Mistral's language in this direction.

-a.

This suffix marks the infinitive of the first conjugation, and also the past participle. It answers to the French forms in -er and -e. As the first conjugation is a so-called "living" conjugation, it is the termination of many new verbs.

-a, -ado.

-ado is the termination of the feminine of the past participle. This often becomes an abstract feminine noun, answering to the French termination -ee; _armee_ in Mistral's language is _armado_. Examples of forms peculiar to Provencal are:

oulivo, _an olive_.

ouliva, _to gather olives_.

oulivado, _olive gathering_.

pie, _foot_.

piado, _footprint_.

-age (masc.).