Catalan

First Published in 2004. Among the languages of Europe spoken by bilingual communities, Catalan has a special status because of its vitality. Catalan enjoys official recognition in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, in spain and in the principality of Andorra. Catalan is of importance within the Romance family because it constitutes a link between the Ibero-Romance family of languages and the Gallo-Romance branches. This book will be of interest to both Romanists and general linguists engaged in comparative work.

Are you looking for a complete course in Catalan which takes you effortlessly from beginner to confident speaker? Whether you are starting from scratch, or are just out of practice, Complete Catalan will guarantee success! Fully updated to make your language learning experience fun and interactive, with complete online audio support. You can still rely on the benefits of a top language teacher and our years of teaching experience, but now with added learning features within the course. The course is structured in thematic units and the emphasis is placed on communication, so that you effortlessly progress from introducing yourself and dealing with everyday situations, to using the phone and talking about work. By the end of this course, you will approach at Level B2 of the Common European Framework for Languages: Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features: NOT GOT MUCH TIME? One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started. AUTHOR INSIGHTS Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience. GRAMMAR TIPS Easy-to-follow building blocks to give you a clear understanding. USEFUL VOCABULARY Easy to find and learn, to build a solid foundation for speaking. DIALOGUES Read and listen to everyday dialogues to help you speak and understand fast. PRONUNCIATION Don't sound like a tourist! Perfect your pronunciation before you go. TEST YOURSELF Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress. AUDIO Access the audio for this course for free by downloading it to the Teach Yourself Library app or streaming it on library.teachyourself.com. TRY THIS Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it. Rely on Teach Yourself, trusted by language learners for over 85 years.

Pompeu Fabra (1868-1948) is renowned as the person who reformed and codified modern Catalan, giving it the condition of a normativised language of culture that proved fit to meet all the challenges of the twentieth century. The context in which he worked was defined by the ideology and momentum of a dynamic Catalan nationalism emerging out of the nineteenth-century cultural revival movement, energies which have continued to affect politics in the Spanish state through to the present. The imposing corpus of Fabra's writings —newspaper articles, lectures and papers, various grammars and the redaction of the official dictionary of Catalan— covered all aspects of the normativisation and the social normalisation of a rejuvenated national language. His work was, moreover, abreast of the most advanced developments in the newly emerging discipline of modern linguistics.The present volume was conceived in response to expressions of disappointment that the figure and the intellectual contributions of Pompeu Fabra have remained virtually unrecognised internationally. Some rectification of this situation is offered by this first ever translation into English of a representative selection of his writings, accompanied by the first substantial study on him in that language. In this way his work should be made much more accessible to the international community of linguists and of specialists in various branches of the social sciences, for whom Fabra's exclusive dedication to Catalan retains great relevance.

This manual is intended to fill a gap in the area of Romance studies. There is no introduction available so far that broadly covers the field of Catalan linguistics, neither in Catalan nor in any other language. The work deals with the language spoken in Catalonia and Andorra, the Balearic Islands, the region of Valencia, Northern Catalonia and the town of l'Alguer in Sardinia. Besides introducing the ideologies of language and nation and the history of Catalan linguistics, the manual is divided into separate parts embracing the description – grammar, lexicon, variation and varieties – and the history of the language since the early medieval period to the present day. It also covers its current social and political situation in the new local and global contexts. The main emphasis is placed on modern Catalan. The manual is designed as a companion for students of Catalan, while also introducing specialists of other languages into this field, in particular scholars of Romance languages.

In a world increasingly dominated by visual sensation, our understanding of the role and influence of comics and cartoon humour in popular culture has become essential. This book offers a critical and cognitive focus that captures the changing fortunes of Catalan humour production against the shifting political landscape in the period 1898–1982. It considers how Catalan satire has been influenced by periods of relative calm as well as censorship, violence, war and dictatorship, and among its key features is its presentation of a continued cartooning tradition that was not ended by the installation of the Franco dictatorship, but which rather continued in a number of adapted forms, playing its own role in the evolution of the period. Thus, as well as introducing the most representative cartoonists and publications, the Catalan example is used to explore broader aspects of this complex communication form, opening new avenues for cultural, historical and socio-political research.

Catalonia, located in Spain's far north-east corner and centred around the port of Barcelona, has its own cuisine and culture which has spread to encompass Valencia, the Balearic Islands (Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza), Andorra, the ancient region of France formerly known as Roussilon, and a single city on the Italian island of Sardinia. Colman Andrews explores this whole territory of Catalan cooking, from its French, Roman and Moorish roots to today's modern interpretation. Along the way he creates a portrait of the food, wine, history and culture of the region.

This volume helps us to understand that the current political disorders in Catalonia have deep cultural roots. It focuses on the rise of Catalan cultural, national and linguistic identity in the 20th century. What is happening in Catalonia? What lies behind its political conflicts? Catalan identity has been evolving for centuries, starting in early medieval ages (11th and 12lve centuries). It is not a modern phenomenon. The emergence of imperial Spain in the 16 c. and the French Ancien Régime in the 17 c. correlates with a decline of Catalan culture, which was politically absorbed by the Spanish state after the conquest of Barcelona in 1714. However, Catalan language and culture flourished again under the stimulus of the European Romantic Nationalism movement (known as the Renaixença in Catalonia). During the first Dictatorship (Primo de Rivera, 1923-1930), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and the long Francoist era (1939-1975), Catalan language and culture were repressed, yet refurbished and reconstructed at the same time. This rise of a plural, complex, and non-homogeneous Catalan identity constitutes the subject matter of this volume. National conflicts that emerged later in the Spanish democratic state leant heavily on the life engagement and vital commitment experienced by the entrenched intellectual movements of the twentieth century in Catalonia, Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands. This book reveals the cultural and literary grassroots of these conflicts.

This monograph presents an experimental and theoretical inquiry into the role of sentential form and variation in the prosodic structure of Catalan. The empirical section examines intonational phrasing across sentence forms, including SVO structures with either nominal or sentential objects and structures involving clitic left- and right-dislocations. The results show variation in phrasing that depends on syntactic factors and non-syntactic factors such as topic-hood and prosodic binarity. The theoretical section uses Stochastic Optimality Theory to model the variation and frequency distributions associated with the observed prosodic patterns. Various syntactic and non-syntactic factors are represented by alignment constraints, which play a major role in Catalan, and by constraints that limit size and those that limit the overall amount of prosodic structure. This study represents a combined approach to prosody and syntax and is of particular relevance for theoretical and empirical linguists interested in the relationship between these domains both in Catalan and other languages.