Jensen Frede. The syntax of medieval Occitan

Berlin, Boston: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986. — 440 p. — (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 208).The selection of the title for my work has been a matter of some concern to me, though not for any political reasons. I have always considered the term Provençal to be a most appropriate label to apply to a work which, like the present one, deals almost exclusively with the medieval language, casting hardly more than a cursory glance at conditions prevailing in the modern dialects of the South of France, and which does not concern itself with dialectology. While titles such as The Syntax of the Troubadours or Troubadour Syntax were dismissed without too much hesitation, as they do not adequately cover the scope of my work, though certainly emphasizing its pièce de résistance, it was only with the greatest reluctance that I deserted the term Provençal. Provençal was the discipline to which Appel, Anglade, Levy, Crescini, Grandgent, Stimming, Schultz-Gora, and many others too numerous to mention, devoted so much of their time and effort, and my philosophical ties to that tradition are in evidence throughout the work. Occitan, however, has established itself as the technical term used in all modern scholarship dealing with the language of the South of France. Its victory seems irreversible, and no useful purpose would be served by clinging desperately to a terminology of the past.