SC - Catalan language

[Stefan li Rous]

While filing away one of the recent messages on Catalan into one of
my files, I happened to see the following message posted here sometime
back. As I thought it might be of interest I'm posting it here.
- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****

> From: Stephen Bloch <sbloch at adl15.adelphi.edu>
> Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 14:19:55 -0400 (EDT)
> Subject: Re: SC - Spanish sources
>  
> > 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