Un Inventari de joies reials en temps de Jaume II. Notes lingüístiques

Abstract

Among the existing documentation from the Crown of Aragon, it is not unusual to find inventories of jewels belonging to the kings of the Aragonese chancellery. There is a good specimen in the municipal archive of Saragossa, in the form of a fourteenth-century manuscript belonging to the Diplomatic Series, in which two lots of jewels are described. In this article, we offer a linguistic analysis of the text and comment on the most interesting linguistic traits with a view to classifying the style of writing. The script reflects the general state of Catalan in the fourteenth century, with its abundance of archaic forms as compared to the present-day language and negligible dialectal variation, among which we note confusion of unstressed a-e, typical of eastern varieties of Catalan. There are also a number of features that suggest that the writer was from the north-east of the Catalanspeaking, area, perhaps from Roussillon.