I bought Alain Nouvel’s textbook L’Occitan sans peine (Paris: Assimil, 1976) several years ago in a Madrid bookshop, but I passed on the cassette package, which cost nearly a hundred euro and had evidentally spent a couple of decades in the sun. I regretted that for a long time, since from the textbook alone I [...]
This is somewhat old news, but still interesting. The developers of the ISO 639-3 standard, a code that aims to define three-letter identifiers for all known human languages, decided in March to consider Provençal a subset of Occitan, and so now Provençal material is to be marked up with three-letter code oci for Occitan.
I’ll briefly interrupt my seaside repose in Vama Veche to peddle some wares. I have some books I left in the US some years ago that a relative has put on eBay. Of most linguistic interest is Assimil’s Occitan textbook, one of only two guides I’ve ever seen for conversational Occitan. Lovers of Romance languages [...]
While mainstream publishers use plenty of hyperbole in the titles of their textbooks, from Teach Yourself’s ‘Instant’ series to Hugo’s ‘In Three Months’ books, the product usually still works somewhat if you put enough work into it. Only recently, however, have I discovered that there’s a wide variety of snake-oil products for language learning, and [...]