Homilies d'Organyà are no longer the oldest surviving Catalan text? Well, it seems not. Palaeographic research provides new data on the first complete texts written in Catalan. It is a copy of a translation of Liber iudicum, the Llibre dels jutges, which brings together laws proclaimed by the Visigothic king Recesvinto in the 7th century, which were in force in Catalonia until the mid-13th century. The copy has been dated between 1060 and 1080 and is kept in the Arxius del Bisbat d'Urgell.
But Organyà should not worry, because the new documents studied are also linked to its population, since it was Traver Radolf, presbyter of Santa Maria de Organyà, the copyist of that text. Thus, the municipality of Alt Urgell can continue to boast of being the cradle of written Catalan.
Does this mean that the Catalan language is older than previously believed? The answer is a resounding no. What the dating of these documents contributes is that there are entire written texts prior to the Homilies d'Organyà. We are specifically talking about a century and a half, because the homilies are now dated around the year 1220.
The authors of this research are two university professors who present their studies in the book Lettres que parlen. Journey to the origins of Catalan (La Magrana). The paleographers of the Autonomous University of Barcelona are Jesús Alturo, professor in the department of Ancient and Medieval Sciences, and Tània Alaix, researcher in the Paleography, Codicology and Diplomacy seminar.
Their studies have used the comparison with other documents attributed to the same author, Traver Radolf, in such a way that they have been able to fix the dating of the Llibre dels jutges in the fork of these twenty years, 1060-1080, prior to the fire of the canonical church of Santa Maria. of Organyà, as evidenced by the charred parts that the document presents. Traver Radolf left several documents written in good Latin between the years 1066 and 1084 and surely, the researchers conclude, he is the same author of the copy of the Llibre dels jutges, which he made for Judge Albertí de Organyà. The parchment studied was later used, at the beginning of the 16th century, as a cover for a file of documents from Conques, a neighboring town to Organyà.
But the work presented by Alturo and Altaix goes further and sets new dates for important documents of pre-literary Catalan, before Ramon Llull. This is the case of the Homilies d'Organyà, whose writing dates to around the year 1220, unlike the dating of its discoverer, the historian Joaquim Miret i Sans, who dated it to the end of the 12th century.
The researchers also give a new date, contemporaneous or a little later than the Homilies, for the other copy of the Llibre dels jutges that is kept in the Library of Montserrat, and that Anscari M. Mundó placed at the end of the 12th century. “Since 1960, Professor Mundó has already identified the Liber iudicum in Montserrat, fixing the copy in 1190 –explains Alturo–. We date it between the years 1220 and 1230, because Mundó overlooked that the copy was dated according to the year of the Passion of Christ, that is, 33 years apart”. “Mundó got distracted”, the professor ironized, recalling the saying that refers to Homer's carelessness (Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, From time to time, even the great Homer gets confused).
The researchers affirm that there is only one translation of the Llibre dels jutges, from the first third of the 11th century, from which the two mentioned copies come, and they conclude that it was a collective work, under the direction of the Barcelona judge Ponç Bonfill Marc, who also they attribute a relevant role in the Catalan compilation of Usatges.
For the dating, Alturo and Alaix have made use of resources such as comparing the capitulars of a dated document with another that is not, the beginnings of the syllabic partition with a hyphen at the end of a line, or other differential features, which allow them to consider that different manuscripts have been written by the same scribe.
In Lletres que parlen, the teachers have also created a chronology of traces of written Catalan, when a word that is no longer Latin has been found in the middle of a text written in the Roman language. The first of all is Sant Pacià, who was Bishop of Barcelona and who introduces a Latinized si us plau. Or the first woman scribe, Guidenell, who in 1020 signed a document with her name, and not with a period, as was customary at the time, and even added a comment.
But Catalan and the other Romance languages had been spoken for centuries. What happens is that the few who read and wrote only did so in Latin, and it was not until the 11th century that the use of Catalan in documents became general.
