An Introduction to Old Occitan (Introductions to Older Languages)

An Introduction to Old Occitan is the only textbook in print for learning the language used by the troubadours in southern France during the Middle Ages. Each of the thirty-two chapters discusses a subject in the study of the language (e.g., stressed vowels, subjunctive mood) and includes an exercise based on a reading of an Occitan text that has been edited afresh for this volume. An essential glossary analyzes every occurrence of every word in the readings and gives cognates in other Romance languages as well as the source of each word in Latin or other languages. The book also contains a list of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes and a dictionary of proper names.

William D. Paden is Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University. A specialist in literature of the Middle Ages, he was co-editor with the late Mario Trovato of a 13th-century philosophical treatise in Latin, Guillelmus de Aragonia, De Nobilitate Animi (2012); co-author with Frances Freeman Paden of a book of English verse translations, Troubadour Poems from the South of France (2007); editor of essay collections on Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (2000), The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s (1994), and The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours (1989); editor of The Medieval Pastourelle (1987); and co-editor of The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born (1986). He was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship in 2011 for a project on "Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours."