places, these officials had to provide a treat for their colleagues when it was their turn to
sing the O antiphon.
Joseph H.Dyer
[See also: ANTIPHON; MAGNIFICAT]
Liber Usualis. Tournai: Desclée, 1956, pp. 340–42.
Callewaert, Camillus. “De groote Adventsantifonen O.” In Sacris erudiri. Steenbrugghe, 1942, pp.
405–16.
Rankin, Susan. ‘The Liturgical Background of the Old English Advent Lyrics: A Reappraisal.” In
Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the
Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Thurston, Herbert. “The Great Antiphons, Heralds of Christ-mas.” The Month 106 (1905):616–31.
Weber, A. “Die sieben O-Antiphonen der Adventsliturgie.” Pastor bonus 19 (1906–07):109–19.
OCCITAN LANGUAGE
. The indigenous language of roughly the southern third of what is now France. Occitan is
not “a dialect of French” or of any other language. Like the other Romance tongues, it is
derived from the spoken form of Latin that spread throughout the Roman Empire. After
the conquest of Gallia Cisalpina, or northern Italy, completed shortly after 200 B.C.,
Rome soon extended its influence across the Alps into Gallia Transalpina. At that time,
southern Gaul was inhabited by peoples whose languages are little known to us, notably
Ligurians in the southeast, in the southwest tribes referred to variously as Iberians, pre-
Basques, or Aquitanians, and an overlay of Gauls throughout the area. A few Greek
colonies had been established along the coast beginning ca. 600 B.C.
The Roman military penetration of Qccitania began ca. 125 B.C., when Roman forces
were called on to repel a Celtic attack against the Greek colony of Massilia (now
Marseille). Around 120 B.C., a Roman colony was founded farther west along the coast
at Narbomie, which gave the name Gallia Narbonensis to the coastal territory between the
Alps and Pyrénées, forming a link between Italy and the Roman provinces of Hispania. It
was from southern Gaul, later known simply as Provincia, that in 58 B.C. Julius Caesar
launched his conquest of “all Gaul.” Latin gradually spread through Gaul, where Gaulish,
a language of the Celtic family, became extinct by the 5th century A.D. (except, possibly,
in Brittany).
The Occitan language developed its distinctive features from around the 5th to the 8th
century. Texts of that time were written only in Latin, but we can suppose that by the 8th
and 9th centuries religious works, such as hymns, religious dramas, and sermons (as
recommended by the Council of Tours in 813), were being produced in spoken Occitan.
Isolated Occitan words and expressions begin to appear in the late 10th century in oaths
of fidelity written in Latin. The earliest known text entirely in Occitan, the Boeci, a
Limousin fragment of the life of Boethius adapted from a Latin original, probably dates
from shortly after the year 1000. Also from ca. 1000 dates the Occitan refrain to an alba
(dawn song) otherwise written in Latin. The Canço(n) de santa Fe (probably written in
Languedoc, in or near Narbonne) dates from the mid-11th century, followed by other
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