This partial survey of the subject of the suffixes in Mistral’s dialect will suffice to show that it is possible to create words indefinitely.  There is no academy to check abuse, no large, cultivated public to disapprove of the new forms.  The Felibres have been free.  A fondness for diminutives marks all the languages of southern Europe, and a love of long terminations generally distinguished Spanish latinity.  The language of the Felibres is by no means free from the grandiloquence and pomposity that results from the employment of these high-sounding and long terminations. Toumbarelado, toumbarelaire, are rather big in the majesty of their five syllables to denote a cart-load and its driver respectively.  The abundance of this vocabulary is at any rate manifest.  We have here not a poor dialect, but one that began with a large vocabulary and in possession of the power of indefinite development and recreation out of its own resources.  It forms compounds with greater readiness than French, and the learner is impressed by the unusual number of compound adverbs, some of very peculiar formation. Tourna-mai (again) is an example.  Somewhat on the model of the French va-et-vient is the word li mounto-davalo, the ups and downs. Un regardo-veni means a look-out. Noun-ren is nothingness. Ped-terrous (earthy foot) indicates a peasant.

Onomatopoetic words, like zounzoun, vounvoun, dindanti, are common.

Very interesting as throwing light upon the Provencal temperament are the numerous and constantly recurring interjections.  This trait in the man of the Midi is one that Daudet has brought out humorously in the Tartarin books.  It is often difficult in serious situations to take these explosive monosyllables seriously.

In his study of Mistral’s poetry, Gaston Paris calls attention to the fact that the Provencal vocabulary offers many words of low association, or at least that these words suggest what is low or trivial to the French reader; he admits that the effect upon the Provencal reader may not be, and is likely not to be, the same; but even the latter must occasionally experience a feeling of surprise or slight shock to find such words used in elevated style.  For the English reader it is even worse.  Many such expressions could not be rendered literally at all.  Mistral resents this criticism, and maintains that the words in question are employed in current usage without calling up the image of the low association.  This statement, of course, must be accepted.  It is true of all languages that words rise and fall in dignity, and their origin and association are momentarily or permanently forgotten.

The undeniably great success of this new Provencal literature justifies completely the revival of the dialect.  As Burns speaks from his soul only in the speech of his mother’s fireside, so the Provencal nature can only be fully expressed in the home-dialect.  Roumanille wrote for Provencals only.  Mistral and his associates early became more ambitious.  His works have been invariably published with French translations, and more readers know them through the translations than through the originals.  But they are what they are because they were conceived in the patois, and because their author was fired with a love of the language itself.