SC - black puddings

[Cindy Renfrow]

> > "If you're more interested in Christian Spain, probably the best sources
> > are Catalan rather than "Spanish" proper: the 14th-century _Libre de
> > Sent Sovi_ and the late-15th or early-16th c. _Libre del Coch_.  We did
> > a feast in February mostly from these two sources; see the Web page
> > "http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/sca/cooking/st.val.feast.html" for menu
> > and example recipes."

(The above quote was from me.)
 
> How different is Catalan from Spanish?  (I can read Portuguese fairly 
> well because of my understanding of Spanish)

I studied Spanish in high school, then translated some medieval recipes
from Spanish to English, but hadn't formally studied Catalan until I
started looking at _Sent Sovi_.  I checked out a "teach yourself
Catalan" book from the library.  I must have lucked out: the one I
found had a bunch of sample readings in the back, not only in modern
Catalan but in medieval and Renaissance Catalan too.  (The readings
were historical, not culinary, but how much can I ask for?)

It's not trivial to read Catalan with a Spanish background, but it's a
lot easier than without a Spanish background.  Some background in French
or Occitan would help too, since France (more specifically, Provence)
is just across the mountains from Catalunya.

Here's an example.  The modern Spanish word "ambos", or "both", has as
cognate the word "amb", which in modern Catalan means "with".  In
medieval Catalan, however, the "m" was often dropped, and the most
common spelling is therefore "ab", still meaning "with".

Catalan also has some funky grammatical rules.  The most intrusive one
is that pronouns for direct and indirect objects are often reduced to
one or two letters, and attached to either the front or the back of the
relevant verb; this can make it tricky looking up the verb in a
dictionary.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University