The Royal Chancellery and Catalan Language
The Royal Chancellery
The Catalan-Aragonese crown created a royal clerk by the 13th century. It was modified by Peter IV of Aragon in 1344 to include foreign professionals in theology, law, art, and writing. This established relationships with other European courts and became a focal point for the diffusion of culture.
Peter IV created the position of Protonotary, responsible for the king’s seals, and other administrative officials in charge of writing texts, such as peace treaties, secret reports, and licenses.
Documents could be written in Latin (the hegemonic language in Europe), Catalan, and Aragonese.
The prose of the Chancellery was an important element of administrative and literary language. Catalan (Koine “supradialectal language”) also served to reduce dialectal variants of the colloquial language. It was accepted as a standard to follow for unification.
Sources of Knowledge of Vulgar Latin
- Literary Texts: Some characters use colloquial and popular Latin.
- Technical Treatises: (agriculture, medicine) written by craftsmen without adequate linguistic training in written Latin.
- Records with Vulgarisms: Written and recorded by people who did not master written Latin.
- Grammatical Texts: Texts on correctness where the most common school mistakes are found.
- Christian Religious Texts: Notes on the popular use of the language of early Christians.
- Glossaries Explaining Vulgar Latin: Explained a colloquial word with a word that had become rare in classical Latin and was no longer understood.
- Romance Languages: We can hypothesize a vulgar Latin.
Lexical Catalan
Catalan has been formed through different processes that affect grammar, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and semantics.
- Popular Words: They are formed from complete phonetic evolution.
Example: VETULA > VETILLA > VELLA - Roots: They are words taken directly from Latin, without undergoing phonetic evolution.
Example: TITULU > TITLE - Semicultisms: Words whose phonetic evolution has been stopped.
Example: SPATULA > ESPATLLA - Doublets: When a Latin word gives two or more words, one through a popular route and the other through a cultured route.
Romance Linguistics
Romania refers to the area where Romance languages, derived from Latin, are spoken. From the viewpoint of phonetic evolution, Romance linguistics is divided into two major groups: Western (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, French, Rhaeto-Romance, and Sardinian) and Eastern (Italian and Romanian).
- Western Romance languages sonorize the intervocalic voiceless stops.
Rhetorical Figures
- Alliteration: Repetition of the same or similar sounds in a verse or phrase.
- Onomatopoeia: Imitation of a sound.
- Paronomasia: Wordplay that opposes phonetically similar words but with different meanings.
Example: I live in the mistletoe, I’m in the forest. - Anadiplosis: Repetition of the last fragment of a verse or syntactic group at the beginning of the next.
- Anaphora: Repetition of one or more words at the beginning of several verses or phrases.
- Asyndeton: Intentional elimination of conjunctions that join words or sentences.
- Ellipse: Deletion of words in a sentence that are understood.
- Hyperbaton: Alterations in the logical order of the elements of the sentence (Putting something behind).
- Polysyndeton: Unnecessary repetition of coordinating conjunctions (Opposite of Asyndeton).
- Chiasmus: Crossover in a symmetrical four-member structure (two from one grammatical class and two from another) following the pattern: ABBA. It can occur in the same verse or contiguous verses.
- Rhetorical Question: A question that does not expect an answer.
- Personification: Giving human qualities to something that has no life.
- Antithesis: Inclusion of two words or expressions with opposite meanings within a phrase.
- Hyperbole: Excessive exaggeration that diverges from reality.
- Synesthesia: Association or exchange of sensations from different senses.
- Pun: Play on words.
- Metonymy: Designation of a thing with the name of another that has a physical or logical relationship of contiguity.
Example: We drank the whole bottle (the contents of the bottle). - Synecdoche: Use of a part’s name for the whole or the whole’s name for the part.
- Simile: Figure of speech that relates two terms, one real and one imaginary, based on a similarity between them.
Normally uses the adverb “like” or “as”.
Example: Like a pineapple is the mouth that captivates me. - Metaphor: Understanding established between two different terms, one real and one imaginary, which have a relation of similarity.
Example: His lips are strawberries (meaning his lips are red like strawberries). - Hypallage: Displacement of an adjective, so the poet places it beside another noun present in the immediate context.
- Pleonasm: Repetition in a single utterance of words that have the same meaning with the purpose of reinforcing what is expressed.