La llengua del manuscrit de 1272 del Llibre de les Costums de Tortosa

Resum

This essay is a detailed general  description of the language used in  the writing of the 1272 manuscript  of Llibre de les Costums de Tortosa  (The Tortosa Book of Customs),  whose text, of a legal nature, was  originally written in Catalan.  The text under study, with its  300 pages, was written during a  period in which a significant affirmation  of the writing of prose in  Catalan was witnessed, which also  meant an enrichment of the cultivated  vocabulary and syntaxis. This manuscript represents a basic source of legal terminology, without underscoring its important lexical component that deal with other topics.  The study is structured in seven  parts as follows: general considerations  (in which the presence in the  manuscript of Castillian expressions  and colloquial idioms is discussed);  graphic questions (in terms of the  various graphic representations of  certain sounds); phonetic aspects  (dealing with contractions, vocalism  and consonantism); morphological  questions (nominal flexive morphology,  personal pronouns, adverbs, a  wide-ranging description of verbal  morphology, etc); syntactic observations  (use of conjunctions and  prepositions, use of verbal tenses,  relative pronouns, etc); lexical matters  (word formation, presence of  Latin idioms, German and Arabic  loan words, toponymy and anthroponomy,  the recurrent apparition of  pairings of synonyms linked by conjunctions);  and, finally, semantic  remarries (in which semantic traits  typical of the age are described).  The author thoroughly analyses the type of language used in this important work according to the subject matter of each one of the different parts, illustrating his study with numerous examples while at the same time highlighting those points that he views as especially relevant.