The people of Catalonia have ever shown strong individuality. When they first came into contact with Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans and other civilized races they were given to agriculture, commerce, industry and the sailing of the sea. So venturesome were they that they had coasted out through the Strait of Gibraltar and down the west coast of Africa before Czsar had visited England. This strength of character they showed in their stubborn retention of their native tongue long after the greater part of the rest of the Iberian Peninsula had adopted Latin. Cicero states that. in his day, which was some considerable time after the conquest, the Catalonians possessed and used a distinct language of their own. This is all the more strange since the other parts of Spain came much less into contact with the Romans than did all the east coast of the peninsula. We are also told that the Cata lonians spoke different dialects in different parts of their own country. This is born out by the fact that even to-day there is a con siderable variation in the Catalan speech throughout the extensive territory in which it is spoken. If we are to judge from the re mains of early Catalan literature of the popu lar kind and the distinct difference between the pronunciation of Catalan to-day and that of the districts where Provencal had its home, it is more than doubtful if Provencal, even in the days of its popularity in Catalonia and Valencia, was ever understood, by the masses of the peo ple; or by anyone except the nobility and the followers of the court, who through intermar riages and other relationships, had made of Provençal a common tongue for Valencia, Catalonia and the Provencal country. It was, therefore, in a sense, artificial. This explains why Provencal, after it lost its literary in fluence in Catalonia and Valencia, dropped sud denly out of sight, while the native tongue came out from its literary retreat, vigorous and individualistic, capable of expressing all the needs and aspirations of a distinctly individual people. Even at the date of the earliest Cata
lan manuscript it has every evidence of being a distinct tongue with fixed grammatical and other forms; and soon afterward there sprang into existence Catalan grammars, dictionaries and a large body of distinctive literature; and from this and a later period there survive many manuscripts and printed books; so that the comparison of Catalan with the other Hispanic languages is rendered easy.
One of the distinctive features of Catalan which distinguishes it from the other Hispanic tongues is its tendency to suppress many of the consonant and unaccented vowel endings so common in Spanish. Thus the Spanish hom bre, man, becomes horn in Catalan; ciudadano, citizen, becomes ciudada ; bucno, good, bo. There is also a tendency to other contractions not seen in Spanish. Catalan had early be come an analytical language and had thrown overboard all Latin declensions and other forms peculiar to Latin grammar. Catalan has its own distinctive accent and rough throat sounds different from the other dialectic forms of Spanish. The Catalan speaks very fast, and this combined with his cutting of the Latin final vowel forms (except a) makes it dif ficult for even the Spaniard to understand him when he speaks Spanish. In Catalan the absence of noun declensions is noticeable; and there is a tendency to strongly accentuate z be tween vowels; the Latin u is never modified as in French and the Provencal au becomes o.
Finally the b and v are kept distinct. Consult Baellot y Torres,