Julià-Bernat Alart and the Inventari de la llengua catalana: A long overdue study

Abstract

This article is an approach to the life and work of Julià-Bernat Alart, an archivist, historian and philologist from Roussillon, who was one of the most important intellectuals of the nineteenth century in northern Catalonia, and author of a vast output, a large part of which remains unpublished. Among the unpublished work we should mention the Essai de dictionnaire historique de la langue catalane or Inventari de la llengua catalana, a collection of thousands of handwritten lexicographical records, each one dealing with a Catalan word along with references to documentation in which it was found -mostly medieval- and the corresponding dates. Inspection of a small selection of the entries in the Inventari reveals important linguistic information that is missing from the two great historical reference works for Catalan, the DCVB and the DECat, either in the form of new lemmas, first uses or new geographical locations.