of the provinces; it should be remembered, however, that the political and the linguistic boundaries rarely coincide. For some of the principal dialect differences, see §§ 8 and 10-13.

5. The language of the poets was sometimes called lemosí; and, in fact, the foundation of their literary idiom is the speech of the province of Limousin and the adjacent territory on the north, west, and southwest.[4] The supremacy of this dialect group is apparently due to the fact that it was generally used for composition earlier than any of the others: popular song, in all probability, had its home in the borderland of Marche[5]; religious literature in the vulgar tongue developed in the monasteries of this region; the artistic lyric was cultivated, we know, at the court of Ventadour, and it must have found favor at others. Furthermore, many of the leading troubadours belonged by birth or residence to the Limousin district.

6. The troubadours’ verses, as we have them, seldom represent any one dialect in its purity. The poet himself was doubtless influenced both by literary tradition and by his particular local usage, as well as by considerations of rhyme and metre. Moreover, his work, before reaching us, passed through the hands of various intermediaries, who left upon it traces of their own pronunciation. It should be said, also, that the Limousin was not a single dialect, but a group of more or less divergent types of speech. For these reasons we must not expect to find in Provençal a uniform linguistic standard.

7. Neither was there a generally accepted system of orthography. When the vulgar tongue was first written, the Roman letters were used with approximately the same values that they had in Latin, as it was then pronounced. As the Provençal sounds changed, there was a conflict between the spellings first established and new notations based on contemporary speech. Furthermore, many Provençal vowels and consonants had no equivalents in Latin; for these we find a great variety of representations. The signs are very often ambiguous: for instance, c before e or i (as in cen, cinc) generally stands in the first texts for ts, in the more recent ones for s, the pronunciation having changed; z between vowels in early times usually means dz (plazer), but later z (roza); i between vowels (maiór) indicates either y or dž (English j), according to the dialect; a g may signify “hard” g (gerra), dž (“soft” g: ges), or tš (English ch: mieg). It is probable that for a couple of centuries diphthongs were oftenest written as simple vowels.

8. Some features of the mediæval pronunciation are still obscure. The close ọ was transformed, either during or soon after the literary epoch, into ụ (the sound of French ou); hence, when we meet in a late text such a word as flor, we cannot be certain whether it is to be sounded flọr or flụr. We do not know at what time Latin ū in southern France took the sound ü (French u): some suppose that it was during or shortly before the literary period; if this be true, the letter u (as in tu, mur) may represent in some texts ụ, in others ü. In diphthongs and triphthongs whose first element is written u (cuer, fuolha, nueu, buou), this letter came to be pronounced in most of the dialects like French u in huit, while in others it retained the sound of French ou in oui; we cannot tell exactly when or where, in ancient times, this development occurred. In the diphthongs ue, uo (luec, fuoc), opinions disagree as to which vowel originally bore the stress; subsequent changes seem to indicate that in the 12th and 13th centuries the practice varied in the different dialects. Old Provençal must have had in some words a peculiar type of r, which was sufficiently palatal in its articulation to call for an i-glide before it (esclairar); we do not know precisely how it was formed; in most regions it probably was assimilated to the more usual r as early as the 12th century. The š and ž (palatal s and z) apparently ranged, in the several dialects, between the sounds of French ch and j on the one hand, and those of German ch (in ich) and j (in ja) on the other; the former types were largely assimilated, doubtless by the 13th century, to s and z (pois, maisó), the latter were not (poih, maió).

9. The following table comprises the Old Provençal sounds with their usual spellings, the latter being arranged, as nearly as may be, in the order of their frequency. Diphthongs and triphthongs are included in the vowel list, compound consonants in the consonant table. For an explanation of the phonetic symbols, see p. vii. The variant pronunciations are discussed in § 8.