116v

[schimmelchampagne]

Welcome from another relatively recent member! From my point of view, your post is a good approach to the matter and perfectly understandable without a linguistics degree. The reading of the first sentence in particular seems interesting.

Thanks!

My only issue with the interpretation as some Romance language/dialect from the Pyrenees or even further west is that it complicates the history of the manuscript significantly and is at odds with most of the other information pointing to Northern Italy/Southern Germany/Augsburg/Prague, both for the manuscript's creation and the first appearances we know of. Sure, ~200 years is a lot of time to circulate within Europe, but every transfer would have increased the probability of leaving traces behind, beyond some barely understandable notes.

When I first tried to interpret what was written on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I deliberately tried to remain a bit ignorant about what others have said about the provenance of the ms so as not to bias myself linguistically. Having gone back and read/watched some material on the topic I agree that the Pyrenees are at odds with what others have said. But I stand by what I wrote! If you believe my letter categorizations (another issue entirely!) then that's where the linguistic evidence points.

Having reflected on my post in the month that's passed I've had a few more thoughts:

• I believe text of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is multilingual (a Romance language and a Germanic language). If one person authored all of it, we can assume that person was multilingual. What types of people would have been bilingual in an Occitan-like language and a Germanic language at this point in history? (This is not a rhetorical question -- I don't know!) 
  
• If the first few lines are written in a Romance language, it seems to be an as-yet undocumented variety (perhaps spoken in a remote area and seldom written), or to be the author's non-native language, or both. 
  
• In my interpretation of the text, it is a message written to someone else so that that person might read the words aloud. Something like, "Here, this is the part I'll read aloud, or you can do it if you want: ..." as if these are notes for a ceremony. If this is the case, then maybe  it's the addressee and not the author who is the native "Romance X" speaker. 
  
• I really believe that <d> is used in place of <l> by this person. I know it seems weird. There were a couple of important sound changes in this region around this time: 1) the pronunciation of word-final /l/ as [w] or[u] in French and some dialects of Occitan (but not in Catalan) and 2) a sort of strange sound change that happened in Catalan around the beginning of the 15th century where what was Latin /d/ in some contexts came to be pronounced as [u] word-finally (as in peu 'foot'). This means that both <d> and <l> would've been used in the region to represent word-final [u]. My thought is that the scribe confused them. To confuse them, you'd have to both be familiar with a spelling tradition where <d> stands sometimes for [u] and not be familiar with Old French and Occitan and Castilian spellings that would've used <l> for words like tal and Olasabal/Olaçabal.
  

Anyway, all of this is to say that I think the Romance language of this text is not necessarily the native language of the person who wrote it. My interpretation doesn't necessarily mean that the manuscript originates in the Pyrenees, but I do think that some connection to that region seems to be a piece of its history. Maybe this multilingualism suggests some degree of itinerancy by the manuscript's users.