he transforms more or less, keeping them in harmony with the forms peculiar to the langue d’oc.  Hence, it is true that the language of the Felibres is a conventional, literary language, that does not represent exactly the speech of any section of France, and is related to the popular speech more or less as any official language is to the dialects that underlie it.  As the Felibres themselves have received all their instruction and literary culture in the French language, they use it among themselves, and their prose especially shows the influence of the French to the extent that it may be said that the Provencal sentence, in prose, appears to be a word-for-word translation of an underlying French sentence.

Phonetically, the dialect offers certain marked differences when contrasted with French.  First of all is the forceful utterance of the stressed syllable; the Provencal has post-tonic syllables, unlike the sister-speech.  Here it may be said to occupy a sort of middle position between Italian and Spanish on the one hand, and French on the other; for in the former languages the accent is found in all parts of the word, in French practically only upon the final, and then it is generally weak, so that the notion of a stress is almost lost.  The stress in Provencal is placed upon one of the last two syllables only, and only three vowels, e, i, o, may follow the tonic syllable.  The language, therefore, has a cadence that affects the ear differently from the French, and that resembles more that of the Italian or Spanish languages.

The nasal vowels are again unlike those of the French language.  The vowel affected by the following nasal consonant preserves its own quality of sound, and the consonant is pronounced; at the end of a word both m and n are pronounced as ng in the English word ring.  The Provencal utterance of matin, tems, is therefore quite unlike that of the French matin, temps.  This change of the nasal consonants into the ng sound whenever they become final occurs also in the dialects of northern Italy and northern Spain.  This pronunciation of the nasal vowels in French is, as is well known, an important factor in the famous “accent du Midi.”

The oral vowels are in general like the French.  It is curious that the close o is heard only in the infrequent diphthong ou, or as an obscured, unaccented final.  This absence of the close o in the modern language has led Mistral to believe that the close o of Old Provencal was pronounced like ou in the modern dialect, which regularly represents it.  A second element of the “accent du Midi” just referred to is the substitution of an open for a close o.  The vowel sound of the word peur is not distinguished from the close sound in peu.  In the orthography of the Felibres the diagraph ue is used as we find it in Old French to represent this vowel.