Les mots occitans pour désigner la construction et le fonctionnement du marteau dans la forge catalane

Abstract

Before the 19th century, well-knownly, the documentation in France of technical terms of many trades is really poor. This applies a fortiori to Occitan as non-national language. Luckily, two scientific treaties of the end of the 18th century dealing with the words of the “catalan” forge are an exception to this. The present article analyzes several lexical units not yet considered by galloroman lexicography, especially those concerning the construction and function of the sledge. One will understand that there existed an elaborated Occitan (and exclusively Occitan) terminology being highly productive in matters of word-formation (by suffixation), borrowing sometimes its words (by metaphor) from the domain of the human body. A certain quantity of these words has been integrated in the corpus of the Littré and Larousse series, appearing there – almost always erroneously – as French words, partly until the middle of the 20th century.

Keywords

• Catalan forge
• Occitan lexicography
• Technical languages in the 18th century
• Occitan word-formation
• Corpus of the Littré and Larousse
• Orality