Occitan

Leopold's castle at Dernstein became the king's holding cell for five months, during which time the English crown pressed hard for a hefty ransom to free their hero.

Richard himself wrote a mournful tune, Janus Hans, Prise, in French and Occitan, lamenting not just his exile but feeling abandoned by his own people who had left him at sea.

The negotiations were brutal.

Henry II demanded ten hundred marks of gold and the hand of a foreign princess, demonstrating how ransom was leveraged as political bargaining.

Consequently medical texts identified piety as a quality that would improve an individual's health.

One late 13th century Occitan regimen included prayer as one of the activities a person must do with joy in order to lengthen their life, while the best-selling dietary, written by the monk-poet John Lydgate, circa 1370-circa 1451, discussed moral conduct and the importance of regular devotions – a person should, for example, do reverence to God on rising – alongside warnings to regulate one's emotions.

And it is clear that religious belief helped many medieval people cope with difficult times.

King Duarte's experience of melancholy was shaped by his conviction that his illness was ordained by God.

You can really see how a sense of we are different could grow from that.

So the Catalan language is a Romance language from Latin, like Spanish and French, but it actually resembles more closely Occitan, the historical language of southern France, than Castilian Spanish.

You can hear it in the vocabulary.

The word for window, for example, is ventana in Spanish.

And Catalan has a third official language, actually.

Up in the Val d'Aran, if you are a skier in Spain, you know that place, Valley on the far side of the Pyrenees.

A few thousand people speak Aranese, a variety of Occitan, and it holds official status alongside Catalan and Spanish.

So, one region, three official languages.

So Jean-François de Gallo.

I don't even know, but it says Occitan.

So I think you pronounce the P at the end because that was his first language, Occitan.

But I'm not sure.

I'm not sure either.

And he was sent to a Jesuit school.

He apparently was a brilliant student.

He spoke fluent Occitan, which is what he spoke at home, interestingly enough, even though the family was nobility.

During these years, she also would've expanded her knowledge of French as a language.

Her first language was actually a regional dialect called Occitan.

Because French was her second language and her formal education was pretty minimal, she did most of her writing in French through a secretary.

In 1784, Jean Jacques Lefrance, Marquis de Pompignan, died, and de Gouges started working on an epistolary novel that would be published in 1788, and that was called Madame de Valmont's Memoirs on the Ingratitude and Cruelty of the Flaucourt Family Toward Her Own, Which Rendered Such Services to the Sieurs Flaucourt.

In the case of the Bretons, they're speaking a Celtic tongue.

But I have friends who are Occitan, and their hatred of Ile-de-France is impressive.

A lot of it becomes because of the project of nationalism itself that took off in the revolution that tried to homogenize everyone.

The reason behind this, it's a reflection of, as I write in the first article, it is industrialism applied to people.

That gives a locale its unique folk flavor.

So with nationalism homogenizing things within said nation, and in exchange for a horizontal popular culture, you now create a new place of divides where previously, let's say in a pre-national context in France, the culture of, you know, of Breton, the culture of Gascon was very, is more or less the same across generations in that specific locale.

And the differences were going from Breton to Occitan territory.

And you'd see the divides are essentially vertical.

The latter composition is a bitter complaint that his people were taking their time raising his massive ransom.

That prison song survives in Old French with a version in Occitan as well.

So we know which languages Richard demonstrably used.

He spoke the French of Northern France, the tongue of his administration and his court.

He knew the Occitan South well enough to trade verses with its poets, which indicates a high degree of fluency.

According to Gerald of Wales, Richard was apparently comfortable enough in Latin to crack a joke at the expense of an Archbishop of Canterbury due to an error in the latter's Latin grammar.

Notably, English appears nowhere on that list, but then, nobody was actually keeping a list, and we of course only have snippets of Richard's life.