Les ordinacions municipals de l'Alguer (1526)

Resum

Since 1354, the year it was conquered, life in the Sardinian town of Alghero was like that of any Catalan community in all its institutional expressions. It was ruled by the same civil and penal laws as other cities of Catalan linguistic heritage were and, specifically, by the same as in Barcelona. The "Municipal Ordinances" transcribed in this article are texts of a juridical and administrative nature, written in 1526, that were designed to regulate activities of the inspector of weights and measures in connection to the economic life of the city. The text under study, excerpted from the "Book of Privileges", offers an interesting display of formal language in the Catalan enclave of Sardinia. The intention behind its publications is to make available a text from Alghero written in a time that has not been very thoroughly researched by historians of Catalan in Alghero, and offer an introductory approach of the study of its linguistic and lexicographical peculiarities. This initial analysis by Rafael Caria of the phonetics, spelling, morphosyntax, and vocabulary present in the text, underscores both the quality of the Catalan used at the time in Alghero, as well as the very secondary role the Sardinian and Castillian languages had played until then in the vocabulary of local speakers. Such vocabulary, necessarily conservative and traditional, only features a few foreign words, limited to those areas that entailed contact with neighboring languages. Worthy of notice is the limited number of loan words from Castillian and how faithful the text is to the Catalan spelling tradition, while at the same time some Valencian remnants can be traced.