ACCIO BIBLIOGRAFICA VALENCIANA “, METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATION” by Professor J. ÁNGELES CASTELLO

Original title: ”Fundamentacio Metodologica de la Llengua Valenciana”. Author: J. Ángeles Castello Editor: Accio Bibliografica Valenciana. Translation: Mª. Olga Sierra Díaz

Professor J. Ángeles Castello was born in () in 1930 and doctorate on the with extraordinary prize the year 1960. Dedicated from always to the teaching, he practised in a beginning in the same University of Valencia, passing afterwards to the USA, in the Alverno College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and in the University of the State of Florida, where maxim reached academic category, being Chief of the Division of Hispanic Studies. In 1977 he reincorporates to the teaching in Valencia where he has practised as Professor of Language and Spanish Literature. He has published some books, for example the "Spanish Literature" (McGraw-Hill, 1970). He has collaborated with numerous articles and works of research in scientific magazines of his speciality, both of Europe and America. For a few years he devotes himself to the study of the Valencian language.

“Valencian language, Methodological foundation”

INDEX

I. METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

A. POINTS OF THE ARGUMENT B. LINGUISTIC CONTIGUITY C. RELIABLE CONTRASTS: CASES OF CONTIGUITY D. IMPRECISION OF THE CONCEPT OF . THE CATALAN AND THE VALENCIAN CASE. E. LANGUAGE F. OTHER CRITERIA G. LINGUISTIC AWARENESS

II. CONNECTED ISSUES OF DIACHRONIC AND EXTERNAL LINGUISTICS

A. VALENCIAN ROMANCE EXISTING BEFORE JAMES´ I ARRIVAL B. LINGUISTIC EVOLUTION C. EXTINCTION OF THE LANGUAGES D. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

III. CODA

I. METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

A. POINTS OF THE ARGUMENT

A problem which has not been appropriately set cannot be solved, mainly when it is related to intimate feelings, since it cannot be dealt with in an objective way. Such is the case of the Valencian language.

To relate it with the Catalan in an absolute and antithetical way, as it often happens, means to move away from the topic we are interested in. The answer to the categorical and emphatic assessment that the Valencian language is the same as the Catalan is that it is not indeed.

In order to get a clearer view of the matter, a less simplistic reflection should be done, taking into consideration a methodology that leads to objective conclusions and deprives the topic of any other questions that are not the strictly linguistic one.

Consequently, the following considerations will focus mainly on what Saussure has called “internal linguistics”, leaving aside the so-called “external aspects” such as history, the relationship between language and culture and other aspects whose subjective nature complicate the methodological understanding of the concept that we are trying to define, the Valencian language. This does not mean that we will ignore such external aspects since they could be helpful to clarify some points of the matter at issue, but we will keep them aside and retake them after defining the most essential points of our argument.

And it is necessary to point out the distinction between the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of the language, since its omission is in a large part the cause of the confusion concerning the relation between the two languages.

As the very terms express, diachronic linguistics studies the historical evolution of languages while synchronic linguistics studies the language at any moment of that evolution. And it is this latter what we are taking into consideration in the topic under discussion. The former, the diachronic dimension of the language, just distorts the statements which are valid nowadays and it just proves, when it does, the coincidence of specific aspects of both languages at some point in their past.

It is generally accepted that the distinction between the two linguistic tendencies is established and accepted after Ferdinand de Saussure´s book was first published in 1915. From then onwards, the bibliography is scarce, as much for the methodological basis as for its applications. It has, however, been systematically ignored when laying the scientifical basis about the dialectalism of the Valencian language, which is still methodologically undefined.

Thus, the confusion emerging from the controversy is just the result of the study of the relations between the Valencian and the Catalan languages from an exclusively diachronic perspective.

It is, then, clear: the problem to solve is that of synchronic and “internal linguistics”. Just later, diachronic and “external” aspects of the matter will be, or not, taken into consideration.

It is worth noticing that the reason for good part of the acrimony that sometimes results from the controversy is due to the vagueness attributed to the concept of “science”. The criterion of authority is not scientific. Furthermore, it is absolutely antiscientific, and the most brilliant pages of the History of Science show, almost systematically, that this, in its advances, has to put aside the dogmatic resistance of the established criteria. Professional linguists´ opinions -some of them worth respecting, others not so much- are not science, just opinions. They will be science when they have a methodological basis, but not before.

Before that happens, they will be a hypothesis. This hypothesis will be operative when it becomes a matter of methodologically valid treatment. If a hypothesis, without the adequate methodological basis, is accepted as the unquestionable and changeless truth, then, we are speaking about a dogma, that is, antiscience. Because the sun has never spinned around the earth. And this is the case, and no other, of the supposed “dialectalism” of the Valencian language. It has not been proved yet, it has just been assumed.

B. LINGUISTIC CONTIGUITY

The duty of determining the original relationship between the Catalan and the Valencian languages would correspond to the diachronic linguistics or philology. Here, as we are following the synchronic line, it is not taken into account, firstly, because it is unnecessary, secondly because it would distort the methodological principle on which we focus our interest.

Starting from a position of linguistic homogeneity, there are the following possibilities, all of them widely documented in the linguistic world map:

1. Division of a community, whose language, because of its historical circumstances and its own nature, does not develop substantially, it does not reach a literary standard, it does not establish distinctive features with a full entity and, in consequence, it does not acquire an awareness of differentiated individuality: a dialect originates.

2. Opposite to the previous case is when a well-defined individualization develops, a new literature comes into existence, people becomes aware of a language of their own, which even becomes the official language of a political entity. Then, we can speak about a linguistic variety.

3. A step beyond, given the same defining elements, we can speak, simply, about language.

The concept of linguistic variety has been coined by the American linguists and accepted by others, mainly the Brasilian. It is certain that the American English comes directly from the British English. However, the cultivated American speaker will smile ironically if he is said to be speaking a dialect. He knows that the language he speaks fulfils all the conditions that a language must possess and as such he considers it, without breaking its historical links. Thus, it is a language to all practical effects. And it is the language which is taught at school and not the British one. The differences between these two variants of the are fewer than the differences that exist between the Valencian and the Catalan languages. The phonological differences are remarkable, and the lexical ones are not so numerous as it is thought; however, when it comes to choose between two words for the same concept, the American English speakers will always make use of their own: they will say, for instance, elevator, never lift, which is used in other sense; as for the orthography, they will keep its differentiating spelling and they will write color and not colour and they will use a wide range of idioms of their own and not the English ones; as regards the syntax the differences are minimal.

The case of the Brasilian language is very similar. Just in a few cultivated circles people will say that they speak “portugués do Brasil”, never just “portugués”, but the generalized term which will doubtlessly prevail is “brasileiro”. How could it be otherwise if people living there is aware of their own linguistic identity?. As can be seen, we are dealing with a language, not a dialect. The last step in the evolution is the change of the name of the language, as in the case of the Portuguese in relation to the and the Icelandic in relation to the Norwegian.

In all these cases the original relationship between the languages is admitted, but the final relations diverge substantially on the basis of the intensity of differentiation of one or the two systems during their evolution. Certainly, such differentiation should be established at the end of the process, and that is why a synchronic approach should be applied. Never a diachronic one.

Then, the linguistic variety comes from a developed language at a late stage of its evolution, while the languages of a family have a common ancestral origin, from which they develop in a parallel way. In both cases the final result can be a differentiated linguistic system.

That is the reason for the interest of clearing out in which of these approaches, how and to what extent, the relationship Catalan-Valencian fits. But this is not what matters now.

The phenomenon of coincidence, sometimes intense, of those languages with the same origin is denominated linguistic contiguity. And that is what explains that close languages are up to a certain extent (just up to a certain extent) mutually understandable, such is the case of the Croatian and the Serbian, the Czech and the Slovakian or the Catalan and the Valencian. It is the consequence of their relationship or linguistic contiguity. But the linguistic limits are not established in relation to the common elements that the languages have, but in relation to their differences, what in linguistics is called “pertinent distinctive features”.

Well then, from a strictly linguistic perspective, the Valencian issue consists of the confusion of contiguity with linguistic identity, on the one hand; on the other hand, it is due to the wrong idea that in every case of contiguity there is, automatically, a relation of dependence. None of these ideas is supported by linguistic laws, which refute them in an axiomatic way. Finally, when it is said that the Valencian is a dialect of the Catalan, too many arguable premises are taken for granted. And many of them are false. Because neither it is a linguistic law that a dialect is the certain result of contiguity nor this is the case of the Valencian, as it is systematically and indiscriminately assumed. The relationship is not, as it is repeated once and again from the ignorance and the adoctrination, to be compared with the relation that exists between the Portuguese and the Galician, or the Icelandic and the Norwegian. But this is not the last word about it.

C. RELIABLE CONTRASTS: CASES OF CONTIGUITY

The purpose of the following reflections is to set the Valencian linguistic problem under a perspective broader than the narrow geographical and conceptual limits in which it is generally situated. Therefore, some cases of linguistic contiguity will be considered for a better understanding of our case, concerning its peculiar nature, in the context of the present European civilization. Firstly, we will make reference to the Yugoslavian conflict.

The Balkans have been, through its history, and up to nowadays, a mixture of nationalities, religions and languages. This swarm of cultures gives rise to a complicated linguistic map, especially in the western area, in Yugoslavia, a nation which was established at the end of the First World War on political grounds, but not on a unitary nationalist or cultural concept. In the north there are Italian, German and Hungarian speaking communities and in the south the Macedonian and the southern Serbian are spoken; the latter is in contact with the Bulgarian, so they are confused in an extensive and complex linguistic boundary. But the most widely spoken languages are the Serbian and the Croatian. The Serbs from the south, in Highlands, an area suitable for the guerrilla bands, carried the weight of the fighting against the Hitlerian wehrmacht and, once the war was over and from the dominant position they had reached, they decided to carry out the linguistic absorption of their neighbours on an exclusively political basis. The Croats, settled on the plain leading towards the River Danube, and with a richer and more varied cultural history thanks to its proximity to the Centroeuropean tradition, offered a strong resistance. They were hard times: some teachers were deprived of their chairs, some journalists were dismissed, some personalities who defended strongly their own ideas went to prison. But ordinary people and intellectuals joined against the coercive elements. And Tito, that extraordinarily intelligent and determined politician, solved the problem in just one evening, after a long meeting with the representants of both positions: the Serbs would speak and write Serbian and the Croats would make use of the Croatian in their cities, their schools and in their journals. In the present day, the Serbo-Croat is the language studied in the few western universities where Yugoslavian study programs are included. And the difficulty that arises is avoidable: the students are explained that there are some articulatory and morphosyntactic differences, especially the latter being found in the verbal inflections, and there are a hundred words characteristic of each linguistic variety. Those students who are interested in contemporary or political topics will mostly deal with the Serbian, those who are concerned with cultural and literary subjects will use the Croatian. And, curiously, the Serbs are the ones who, convinced of the advantages of the Croats´ alphabet, leave behind their traditional cyrilic alphabet, with all that it implies. Bit it happens that that dictatorial and autocratic system chose the respect for the linguistic awareness and the cultural identity of a nation who managed to defend them.

The case of the Czech is different, though also significant. In this country, two close languages are also spoken. But contrarily to what happens in Yugoslavia, the language used for administration and for cultural purposes is one and the same, the Czech. Nonetheless, it does not try to impose its authority on the other one. A distinguished Czechoslovak teacher once told me that perhaps the only problem that her people did not have was the linguistic one. Certainly it has to do with the strong democratic basis and the refined cultural structure of that excellent Bohemian Quadrilateral. Dubcek anticipated the perestroika by several decades. And he had good reasons to do it.

The Icelandic comes directly from Old Norse or Old Norwegian, from which the current Norwegian derives. This genetic relationship could make us consider the Icelandic a dialect, a linguistic variety not spoken for more than 300.000 people in a country which has depended on Norwegians and Danes through its history and it has not reached its complete independence until the Second World War was over: yesterday, we could say, if we compare it with our Valencian history. Well then, the Icelanders have always been aware of their identity and have given their own name to the language they have always spoken, regardless its political dependence on other similar languages. Nowadays, of course, nobody questions such condition. And this is mainly due to their linguistic awareness: they must know what language they speak.

But the case of the Portuguese is closer to us, not so much for its geographical proximity as from a historical and ethnographic perspective. Portugal comes is established as a kingdom in the middle of the 12th century (1140, the first king, Alfonso I, ascends the throne; 1147, the conquest of Lisboa. Both dates are essential for the start of the history of a country), a century before, therefore, than the Valencian kingdom. But its cultural evolution, at a slower pace, does not prove to be strong enough up to the generation that the historians of the Portuguese literature have called “the Quinhentistas Generation”, to which Gil Vicente, Bernardim Ribeiro and Sâ de Miranda belong. Their works are dated late in the 16th century, that is, with a delay of two hundred years with respect to the Valencian Literature. Generally speaking, we are talking about parallel processes with the difference that the Valencian one acquire a clear awareness of its individuality before. The Cancionero da Vaticana, dated at the end of the 15th century, and the Cancionero da Colocci Brancutti, from the 16th century, are still denominated and considered Galician-Portuguese. Later, a progressive separation takes place, as much for the vitality of one of the languages as for the loss of strength and intense influence of the Spanish on the other one. Well: nowadays nobody questions the Portuguese´s right to consider the language they speak as their own, and the Portuguese and Galician Academies, in Lisboa and Santiago respectively, have a clear idea of what the limits of their competence are. Why is this not possible in Valencia?

Because it is evident the peculiarity of the Valencian conflict after a look at the European linguistic map. This is the only language that, from the Hitlerian period and its Yugoslavian consequence, comes through a process of absorption on the basis of “external” aspects, following Saussure´s terminology. I refer, obviously, to the identification of language-culture and its political implications.

D. IMPRECISION OF THE CONCEPT OF DIALECT. THE CATALAN AND THE VALENCIAN CASE.

First of all, it is necessary to establish the uncertain and contradictory nature of the concept of dialect, what has been openly admitted by well-known specialists such as Carlos Alvar or Jean Fourquet, while others avoid the methodological discussion, such as Zamora Vicente does in his excellent Dialectología Española. The profusion and importance of the distinctive features are not, in some cases, enough elements to define them as languages; in this sense, Prof. Yuen Ren Chao, one of the first authorities on Chinese dialectology, maintains that the differences between some of those are bigger than those existing between the Danish and the German, or between the French and the Italian. However, the differentiation is enough in the cases of the Serbian and the Croatian, or the Norwegian and the Icelandic.

The most constant characteristic when it comes to define the concept of dialect is its genetic dependence on its mother tongue. Therefore, the dialect is just a split from the linguistic community to which it belonged and with which it keeps a relation of dependence (this is how La Real Academia defines it). Although there does not exist any adequate analysis of this relation in the case of the Valencian language, it seems to be implicit in the thesis that it is Catalan because it was brought by the colonists after the conquest by James I. But this matter is also questionable; nearly half a century ago Professor Albert Dauzat observed that the French dialects are not parts of a common basis, but they are already established linguistic systems which have been absorbed by a stronger one, the language spoken in the Isle of France. Nowadays this thesis is accepted by the French dialectologists. It also seems to be valid in the case of the Italian and the Tuscan. And there can also be found cases like this in Spain because, together with dialects originated by division, as it is the case of the dialects spoken in Extremadura and Murcia, others, such as the languages spoken in Aragon and Leon, are considered dialects of the Spanish, though actually they are parallel systems which have been absorbed by the stronger power of expansion of the .

The theoretical aspect of the concept of dialect is not important now, so let us put it aside. The intention was just to point out that the term is quite less precise of what supporters of certain theses suggest. But further, what really matters now is to show the contradiction implied by the thesis that states that the Catalan is a language constituted by two dialects, which precede others at the same time. Because the so-called “Eastern Catalan” and “Western Catalan” have never been genetically related, but they have developed independently from each other and in a parallel way from an original Low Latin with possible distinctive features at very early stages of their evolution. There has not been historical dependence on each other, either. That is, the thesis lacks the two basic conditions that define the concept of dialect.

Then, we find the paradoxical situation that the dialects (supposed dialects) of the , far from responding to a principle of coherence, seem an unpredictable block difficult to define from the strictly linguistic point of view, though easily understandable in the light of linguistic politics.

The Catalanist theses support, in an axiomatic way, the concept of the Catalan as a language constituted by two basic dialects, from which derive, by parthenogenesis, the other dialects that belong to their “linguistic domain”. And thus, the unquestionable authority of Prof. Badía Margarit expresses this idea by means of a metaphor: the Catalan is, from its origin, a “bicephalic” language.

It is worth paying a little attention to the coined concept. “Bicephalic” is an unreal concept not related to the natural processes and therefore bound to disappear in a short time; or it is a fantastic irreality, product of mythical or dream processes. Which of these meanings fits the Catalan linguist´s intentions? As it often happens, this metaphor is a failure because of the incorrect perception or modification of the reality. And in this case the language is one linguistic system. One. Not two, because then there will be two languages. The axiom holds not just a logical but also an ontological contradiction.

If none of the two Catalan systems is a dialect of each other, and if none of them is a dialect of a system that contains them, then, what is understood by “dialect”? Because the dialect is always dependent on a language. By definition. The fact is that they are not dialects; they are contiguous diasystems. Another question is that these terms, agreeing with its scientific coldness, tend to separate what, due to “external Linguistics” reasons is necessary to unify. That is why the vague concept of dialect, which suggests integration into a whole system, is obviously more appropriate.

There do not exist languages resulting from the union of dialects. None. There are languages which generate them, and others absorb them; others carry out both functions through their historical process. But when, for explicit historical reasons, some linguistic diasystems originate a suprasystem, no process of absorption having taken place yet and, therefore, keeping their respective individualities, then, such suprasystem will be termed koiné, in linguistic terms. The nature of this concept was very well understood by the Alexandrian Greeks, whose incomprehension led to the Esperanto movement. The systems of communication by the Indians of the North American prairies were useful because they have adopted a middle position; this is still the case in wide areas of Africa. Well then, what is called “Catalan” is a koiné that unifies two linguistic systems, and that is the reason for the artificiality of some of its subsystems, being a good example of it the ortographic system.

I would like to make clear that this character of the Catalan is acceptable as long as it is related to sociopolitical and cultural reasons of . But as the “scientific” basis of the dialectalism of the Valencian language, it is absolutely inconsistent.

Because the unreasonable underlying assumption is that the Valencian is a dialect of the Eastern Catalan, the one which is trying to be standardized, because it is a dialect of the Western Catalan, or “lleidatà”, which is not a dialect of the former. That is, it is a sort of dialect with a (false) intermediary. And that thesis, which is not explicit, is categorically supported by those who claim to do it on a scientific basis. However, its acceptance should be made dogmatically since it holds an internal contradiction which invalidates it rather than being a hypothesis defensible in an objective way. It is not my purpose to be offensive when I make these statements, but the controversy affects to deep aspects of the conception and these arguments try to refute it.

The “Valencian dialect” is also worth being made a reference. In this case, the reference will be historical, not methodological, since from this viewpoint, it is just assumed. It is not possible to refute a number of reasons that have not been given.

Then, let us see how the concept was coined. The first systematization took place thanks to Antoni Alcover who, in 1903, in an of scarcely eight or ten pages, with neither methodological criterion, nor any other basis, decided that one of the dialects of the Catalan is that “de la Ribera d´Ebre y València”. Yes, you have understood well, “Català de la Ribera d´Ebre y València”. And this is how the scientific basis of the dialectalism of the Valencian is established.

Pere Barnils´ proposal shows a little more common sense, but just a little. In an article published in 1919, not longer than Alcover´s, he just provides a mere geographic division of the Catalan language.

Once the basis of the concept has been solidly established, there follows a number of variants about the same topic which confirm the uncertain and changing nature of its basis, or the lack of it.

At this point it is worth mentioning the contribution from Prof. Badía Margarit who, in his Grámatica histórica catalana dedicates a couple of pages, or three, to establish the dialectal system of his language. I insist, two or three pages. He assumes the doctrine of his predecessors; he just modifies it. I mention this fact now because Prof. Badía is a prestigious authority in this field and his assumptions are followed by nearly all the textbooks used at the Valencian schools. They are considered the unquestionable truth of the official science.

But things could have been worse. For instance, the Gran Enciclopedia Catalana asserts that the Valencian language does not exist; instead, there are the “apixat” and “salat”,varieties from the Southern Catalan; and further, the Valencian language is equated with “la llengua de Sant Feliu de Guixols” because both of them are “simples modalitats del catalá”. And although this seems an unfunny joke, it has been seriously stated in a book containing plenty of footnotes. And this is enough.

What really matters now is to bear in mind that the assumption of the dialectalism of the Valencian is senseless and holds no solid arguments, and -I will be clear in order to be understood- it is not a scientific concept, but a dogmatic one; because it is not methodologically grounded; because it is not based on reason, just on authority.

On the other hand, the large number of aspects that have been taken into consideration in order to define the concept of dialect and their entangled interrelations is openly expressed in the recent Introducció a la dialectología catalana, where all kind of arguments, exclusive among them, are pondered, and it is concluded: “Per tal de definir els dialects, els criteris son varis i cap d´ells definitiu”. And the following surprising assertion, supported by Coseriu´s authority, is also found in the same study: “Objectively, then, there does not exist a difference in nature between language and dialect”.

And I say it is surprising because the acceptance of that idea means the rejection of the basic thesis of the study. Because, if there is no objective difference, what are the grounds of a criterion which is said to be scientific? I will give the answer: there are not.

That is why, I will insist on this point, it is imperative to approach the issue by exclusion: dialect will be that linguistic system which does not satisfy the objective conditions to be a language.

E. LANGUAGE

The concept of language has been better defined than the vague and complicated concept of dialect. If many of its formulations are reduced to common denominator, the result will be a well differentiated linguistic system which has the capability to express the individual and collective experiences. In linguistic terms, these defining features are cohesion, differentiation and literature. a) The linguistic cohesion, or levelling, is the first condition of individualization of a language. It refers to the closeness of the subsystems (phonological, lexical, etc.) of the language in all their scope, what is certainly a characteristic of the Valencian language. For instance, the differences appreciated between a speaker from the Vall de Uxó and another from Algemesí or Alcoy are just local, something common to all the languages, but not so relevant as to consider them different ways of speaking. I admit that this is an approximate opinion, but it happens that there is no objective way to measure the linguistic levelling. Luckily, it is not necessary for our purpose here. Let us think that within the Valencian language there are not differences so remarkable as those existing in the Spanish spoken in different places such as Burgos and Malaga, for instance. Or, making reference to a closer case, differences between the two sections of the Catalan. b) Together with the cohesion, there is the differentiation or delimitation of the systems taken as reference. This differentiation is clear and strong in the case of the Valencian since it affects to all the subsystems of the language. Let us go through the different categories. 1. Lexicon: As we do not have the essential monograph, the lexical difference will have to be assumed in an axiomatic way. I will make a pair of remarks rather than mention a number of examples, already known by everybody.

Firstly, no many lexical differences are necessary to give the impression of linguistic division. A few frequently used terms that will take the place of the word itself will be sufficient, with the consequent effect of dissociation and inappropriateness (servei instead of servici, altre for atre...)

The second remark is that the conflict at the level of the common people, to a large extent, has its grounds on the lexical differences. The Valencian speakers feel strange some words which can sometimes be certified as belonging to the classic Valencian, and they reject them. Well then, two different aspects of the word intersect here: the etymological or archaic aspect, on the one side, and the lexico-semantic one, on the other. Through the existence of a language, and this is common to all the languages, there is a constant process of lexical selection in accordance with the changing expressive needs, or the collective choice. In all the selective processes some words become obsolete at the same time that others are imported or coined. The obsolete words give evidence of a previous stage of the language, as well as fossils certify the existence of life in extinct geological periods, although they stopped being living entities, integrated into an ecosystem, millions of years ago. As Dámaso Alonso sometimes says: “a dictionary is a lexical necropolis, because, in its making, new words are included together with those which have already fallen in disuse. Well then, the necropolis are invaluable means of getting to know about the past, and what a scientific will never do is to get the old expressions back. The archaisms of the Valencian language are not Valencian: they were. A triceratops is not an animal; a skeleton from the Han period is not a functionary who has three children, with his distress and happiness. Because he is dead, like the archaism. That is why this is not part of the living and active lexicon which is involved in the expressive processes that constitute the language. And nobody is interested in bringing fossils into life; nobody is going to use the archaisms in the existence of a language in a spontaneous way. It is unthinkable that we, the , must speak the way it was done back in the 14th century when no other people in the world do it. No, things must be clear: the reason for using these extint words and expressions is not that they are classical Valencian, but because they are current vulgar Catalan. Otherwise, why are the archaisms that are no longer used in its parent tongue not actualised? And however, such a deceit is the main argument that is being used in order to cause confusion.

Neither from the Liber elegantiarum, nor from any other classical text, all of them exciting areas of study, will ever be possible to infer the validity of any current term. It has to be understood that if the term is in use, its presence in the glossary or in the text validates and certifies its origin, but if, in accordance with the natural evolution of the language, it has fallen in disuse, both of them will classify it as an archaism, but they will never justify, by themselves, its incorporation to the living lexicon.

Sometimes it has been remarked the great importance that, on differenting grounds, have those words which lack a meaning on their own, such as linking words and determiners (prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, etc.) since the synonymy does not occur among them so easily as it does among nouns, adjectives and verbs. They remain unchanged in the different dialects of a language because of their nature and, therefore, when they change, they are more significant as relevant features of linguistic differentiation.

Here are some examples, which are by no means exhaustive: in Valencian the article lo, is both masculine (together with el) and neuter (the only form used for this gender) whereas in standard Catalan it is replaced, in both cases, by el (el que hi ha que fer); determiners, esta-aquesta; possessives, meua-meva; personal pronouns, nosatros-nosaltres; numerals, dèsset-disset, dos-dues; prepositions a-en (place); baix-de-sota (archaic in Valencian); conjunctions, puix-doncs; adverbs, aci, dins, quasi, aleshores-aqui, dintre, gairebé, llavors. And these examples are sufficient for my aim. Because, the person who thinks that these are a few isolated and hardly conclusive examples, should try to find an approximate number of differences of this kind between the Spanish and any of its dialects, or between any other language and its dialects. And, with a minimum intellectual honesty, he will have to admit the high differentiating value of the examples listed above, together with many others easy to find.

It is also essential to attach importance to the large number of lexical differences that can be found among nouns, verbs and adjectives, whose high proportion makes difficult to consider it a phenomenon of synonymy as it frequently happens. If that was the case, the Catalan, or the Valencian, would be by far the languages containing the larger quantity of synonyms. Because the differences are more numerous than it seems. However, this is not decisive, but it is the fact that the mentioned terms are not synonyms. The cultivated speaker (in the linguistic sense) recognizes the synonyms of his language easily. When the high number of the supposedly equivalent words is ignored by a significant quantity of speakers and, besides, it is just characteristic of restricted linguistic areas, and not others, then, one cannot speak of a case of synonymy. Not really. These terms are just but an overwhelming flow of lexical distinctive features. And it is impossible to deny this on objective methodological grounds or, why not to say it? On objective scientific grounds. 2. Phonology. We are in the dominion of the axiomatic. It is not required an especially good ear to perceive the differences of articulation and intonation which define the two languages. Here are some of them: the Catalan neutral e does not exist in Valencian, or it is heard in local speech at the most. It is equally significant the devoicing of the bilabial before the alveolar lateral (it is said pople instead of poble, and probapla for probable). In Catalan the alveolar frictionless is not pronounced in the final position (pò for por and aná for anar); and what in a language tends to be pronounced as , in the other it is a clear articulation: “In a language the speaker will say pansà (with the voiceless palatal fricative, s), while in the other it will be pronounced penjar (with the voiced affricate j) o penchar (with the voiceless affricate of the apichat, ch).

But above all, the chaotic Catalan vocalic system has to be contrasted to the well defined Valencian one. The former allows to write, for instance, “la temporada de Pepito l´equatoriá al Canigó” and pronounce “la tampurada de Papitu l´aquaturià al Canigú”.

The five mentioned differences, and many more that are included in the essays on Valencian , have, in phonological terms, a great differentiating value. And in any case, instead of technical or uninteresting details (although the exhaustive study would be essential from other perspective), I´d rather point out the importance of the phonological contrasts, because they define the individuality of a language to a larger extent than the lexical or morphosyntactic differences do, because they belong to more automatic and less conscious levels of speech, where choice hardly takes place. A language will be able to accept a lexical borrowing or a barbarism, or even a syntactic structure, but what a language strongly refuses to incorporate are the and articulatory ways which seem strange.

3. Orthography. Every orthographic system is the result of a balance between the graphic tradition and the phonological reality. In Valencian the verb haber is spelt with h and v. The etymological mute graph has been preserved, while the voiced bilabial oclusive became a labiodental fricative, that is, b became v. This word is, then, an example of how the two tendencies that define the orthographical system occur in an absolutely natural way once they have been accepted by convention. However, it has to be born in mind that the writing must be in accordance with the , with the sounds it represents, because an excessive dependence on the tradition may lead to an imprecise and awkward writing, as in the extreme case of the Chinese, which has sixteen graphs for the phoneme shi. Less serious cases of orthographic duplication are found in all the cultivated languages, close to us is the case of the Spanish and the Valencian languages. Nothing would happen if these languages would go through a process of orthographic simplification, except for the necessary effort that the old generations should make to adapt to it. To write historia with h is just a habit, the Italians have eliminated it and their orthography is as correct as the Spanish one, but more coherent. But this does not make it more or less “scientific”.

In Valencian the sound of the alveolar fricative /s/ can be represented by five different graphies: c (principi), ç (feliç), s (sense), ss (passar) and z (Alzira). The same as for the Chinese, tradition has a strong importance. There is no problem in deciding to eliminate three of these graphs, since two of them would be sufficient to differentiate the voiced phoneme from the voiceless one.

A very different thing is when an orthographic change entails a phonological one. Here we will never be able to be accurate enough. Because in this case the last redoubt of the identity of the language is involved, it is the most spontaneous and, therefore, the most firmly rooted in the habit of its speakers. We must not write Elx in the place of Elig because the word will go through a modification of the last phoneme, which will become fricative instead of affricate, that is, Catalan articulation instead of the Valencian one (remember that, on the other hand, the graphy ig also exists for the affricate phoneme in Catalan, in torneig, and many other words). The same applies to the apparently insignificant detail of the grave accent on the e of Valencia, which remains open in the Catalan way, instead of ours, which is close. And in the case of the first person pronoun, jo, the grapheme does not correspond to the phoneme it represents at all.

When the phonology is involved, it is always strongly affected. The orthographic aspect is not important by itself, but it is when the articulation of the words is altered. Therefore, it is not just a matter of wether the Valencians will accept one or other orthographic system. And that is why the most strict linguistic logic, or rather, scientific, should establish that two languages of different phonological systems must determine separately their orthographic uses. Because the orthography of a language must evolve, but in relation to its own needs, and disregarding the needs of other languages. And that is exactly what the Valencian is going through, and that is “scientifically” called normalització (standardization).

And there is still a consideration that explains in part the indiscriminate acceptance of the Catalan orthography by the uninformed speakers (other reasons are also maintained for accepting it): the person who ignores the linguistic mechanisms and the relationship among the phonemes of his language and the symbols with which they are represented, the letters, that person will confuse the exotic and the scientific. “Normalitzar” will be more “scientific” with t than without it for many people who would not be able to explain why. And given the fact that the Catalan is more exotic in Valencia than the Valencian itself (it could not be otherwise), then, for some, it is automatically covered with a scientific halo, although in terms of the language they speak it is a lot of nonsense. It should be understood that a more archaic orthographic system is not, for that reason, more scientific. It is just more artful. And that a system which moves away from the graphic history of a language, without fitting better to its phonology, is less scientific.

4. Morphosyntax. It is frequently argued that the Valencian and the Catalan are one and the same language because they both have the same grammar. However, the morphological and syntactic differences are more numerous and, above all, with a differentiating character stronger than it may seem.

In Catalan a peculiar cross between the verbs ser and estar takes place, sometimes justified with extraordinary ability. Unlike it happens in the Valencian language, ser is used to express position after the change: the speakers will say “som aquí” instead of “estem ací”, but instead, they will use the participle of the verb estar for the passive : “ha estat dit”, rather than “ha sigut dit”; in the same way they will say “ha estat un accident”, etc. This etymological-semantic cross is characteristic and exclusive of the Catalan in relation to the rest of the . In the same way there is a cross between ser and haver, and the speakers will say “no hi-és” in place of “no hi- ha”. The Catalan speakers will use the imperfect form of the subjunctive tense “-se” in opposition to the form “-ra” of the Valencian: “si no fos pas gras” instead of “si no fora gros”. And the respective forms of the verbal flection are significant distinctive features.

Within the Catalan language there is the peculiar habit of moving prepositions to the final position and, as far as I can see, it is characteristic of this language and it does not exist in any other related tongue: “arrós cunill sense” rather than “arrós sense cunill”, or “li cau sobre”, rather than “li cau damunt”, in Valencian, in accordance with the Latin etymology and the forms contained in the languages derived from it. In the same way, we can also find conjunctions that have been moved to another position, as it is the frequent case of però (acute and with open o). Going back to the prepositions, in Catalan the speakers will say a (place where) where the Valencians say en (“a Barcelona”, but “en Valencia”). On the other hand, when the preposition of the direct object is a person, it is omitted: “Jaume va veure Pere”. They express the negative sentences with pas, in the French way; semantically questionable words are used (“per si veiem res”).

The modifiers also provide remarkable contrasts. In the Valencian language, the possessive form usually precedes the noun (“en ma casa”) while in Catalan it follows the noun (“a casa meva”). And peculiar modifiers of intensity are used. For instance, “força be”, or “més aviat prim”, that is, a substantive and a past participle are used, where logically, from a syntactical point of view, there should be placed two adverbs and, consequently, in Valencian we will say “molt be” and “mes be prim”.

Trying to decide in which cases there is Spanish or French influence, when the Valencian and the Catalan terms can be explained with reference to the classics and when they cannot, and how certain peculiarities characteristic of the Catalan are obvious deviations from Latin original forms and make this language different from the Valencian one, the same as from the rest of the other Romance languages, all of these, are most suggesting issues of historical and comparative grammar. But these are not of our concern now.

Criteria of synchronic linguistics are being applied in this discussion, and from this perspective, the mentioned differences, independently of their history, fulfil a clear distinctive function. Because most of the observed features are notorious. The mentioned thesis that “the two languages have the same grammar”, that is, the same syntax, is not well grounded. Because the differences of the Valencian language that have been cited above are also shared by the Spanish; therefore, it can be stated that the Valencian grammar is closer to the Spanish system than to the Catalan one. c) Literature. The expansion of an outstanding literature, whose highest point is known as the Golden Century, takes place in Valencia from the middle of the thirteenth century up to the end of the fifteenth century. It is created by a number of men who are strongly attached to their native land and are absolutely aware of their Valencian nature; and they do it using their own language, the language used in trade and love affairs, among friends and adversaries in their daily life, or the language used in familiar circles and for official affairs. It is a literature which merges from the Valencians´ inalienable feeling and walk of life and it is, therefore, unquestionably Valencian. However, this is not what really matters here, but to point out that this language has reached the standard of expressive dynamism and intuitive- imaginative potentiality that enables it to represent, in its own terms, all the experiences, feelings and passions that literature is made up of. It is not just a system with communicative purposes any longer, it is also a cosmovision. It has reached the expressivity and density necessary to express what in linguistic terms is called poetic level of function. This is the reason why one of the conditions that the language must observe in order to be distinguished from a dialect is its ability to generate a literature of its own. And this condition is, precisely, fulfilled by the Valencian language.

And a further remark: neither a dialect, because of the ancillary uses it is assigned, nor an uprooted language, because of the specific elements that condition it, originate a literature. It is worth noticing that languages of an old literary tradition such as the German and the French, have become literarily unproductive when they have been taken to other territories. As regards the British English, the American variant is dynamic, creative and prolific, while the African and the Australian variants are not. And the excellent American literature, on both sides of River Grande, has got value only after more than three centuries, since it has not been really important up to the Romanticism.

The Portuguese case is closer to the Valencian one. Portugal is constituted as an independent historical entity a hundred years before Valencia was, but its literature begins to exist two centuries and a half after the Valencian one did.

There must be an explanation for the quick bloom of the Golden Century, a unique phenomenon in the history of literature, and the answer can be found, it cannot be otherwise, in the character of the society of that time. And this is one of the main reasons why, strictly speaking, this literature is Valencian. And nothing else.

Those same reasons, taken to a more general context, are accepted as valid by the specialised intellectuality everywhere: if Faulkner is an American writer and he is not included in the English literature, and Borges is an Argentinian stylist, and he is not studied in the Spanish one, then, logically, Ausias March, who is a Valencian poet, should not be included in other literature rather than the Valencian one. Logically.

The preceding considerations have established the cohesion, in linguistic terms, the levelling, and the delimitation, or differentiation of the Valencian language, besides the fact that a literature has emerged from it. It seems difficult to refute, in objective terms, any of these points. Well then, the language, in contrast to the dialect, is “the linguistic system used by a speaking community, characterized for being strongly differentiated, for having a high levelling, for being the means of an important literary tradition and, sometimes for having imposed its own authority on linguistic systems of the same origin”.

This last point is not a defining concept but just complementary. It happens “sometimes”, not necessarily. Precisely the Swedish has not dominated other Southern German languages, nor has the Polish prevailed over other Slavonic languages, or the Bulgarian, the Sardinian, the Croat, the Hungarian and the Czech. And their status as languages has not been questioned in any case. What all of them have done is to maintain their individuality before the others; otherwise, they would have disappeared as it was the case of the Dalmatian, the Polabian or the Cornish. Then, we can do without this condition. Thus, it turns out that the Valencian fullfils the three conditions necessary to be considered a language, in contrast to the dialect. There is no reason, in linguistic terms, to consider it a dialect of any other language. It is a wrong concept, just taken for granted, but with no solid grounds. It is based on a criterion of authority, not on reason or method. It is not scientific, it is dogmatic.

F. OTHER CRITERIA

So far the concept of Valencian language has been delimited paying attention to the strict methodology. But there are other components of the Linguistics which help to consolidate the basis of the concept already established. a/ Sociopolitical criterion. The Valencian language has the category of language, that is, there is a geopolitical entity with an institutionalized language of its own. This is the case of the Valencian, one of the official languages in the , current denomination of the , which has an uninterrupted historical and institutional continuity of seven and a half centuries. b/ Demographic criterion. Sometimes used to differentiate between language and dialect. Given two close diasystems, the one which has several million of speakers will be regarded as a language, while the other will be considered a dialect on the basis that it is just spoken by hundreds of thousands (at least until stronger methodological reasons confirm it). Since this is an issue connected with “external Linguistics”, the most recent approaches tend to ignore it. Anyway, it is worth pointing out that, leaving aside the last statistics, the Valencian-Catalan relationship is quite closer than the Norwegian- Icelandic one, the latter being spoken for not more than 300.000 people; however, nobody questions its category of language. Not to speak of the cases in which the speakers of “the dialect” are more numerous than those who speak “the language”, as in the case of the American English in relation to the British English, the Portuguese and the Galician or the brasileiro and the Portuguese. As can be seen, it is a weakly grounded criterion, and this does not support the thesis of the dialectalism of the Valencian language either. c/ Geographical criterion. The dialectology of the old school and the most cautious linguistic geography also confirm the linguistic dimension of the Valencian language. Malmberg explains that both languages and dialects are subjected to the old law of irradiation, according to which the linguistic renewal inherent to every living language generates in its cultural centre and extends towards the periphery, so that the most archaic forms are the most distant from the dynamizing centre. A good proof of this law is found in the evolution of the Spanish languages in their formation period, following Menendez Pidal´s well-known theory and, on a different level, it is also confirmed in a number of studies by the French dialectologists. Well then, these waves of linguistic change spread fluently over the domain of a language. The dialects show no resistance to them, but mildly accept the innovations that, in its turn, they transmit. On the contrary, when the waves reach the limits of other linguistic domain, that is, other language, a conflict arises, because they clash with waves coming from other centre. Then, the characteristic phenomenon of linguistic boundary, also expressively termed “turbulence” by an occasional American essayist, takes place.

The isoglosses or representative lines of the linguistic features cross and mix with each other and the speech of those neighbouring areas acquires a character of patois, a mixture of elements of different origin, and sometimes contradictory, which determine not just the mixture of features of the languages in conflict, but also the appearance of new forms which are characteristic of the boundary instability. This law is confirmed by towns like Anna, situated in the area of the Castilian-Valencian boundary. The language spoken in the English-Mexican boundary, in the United States, borders the schizophrenia, literally. It is plain that, obviously, the more distant the languages in conflict are, the more broken the boundary speech is, and the Valencian and the Catalan are not very distant from each other, but who has paid any attention to the way that people speak in and Vinaroz will have clearly observed this phenomenon, which is typically reflected in the inflections, the hesitations in the verbal inflections and the appearance of forms new to both languages, such as matros and natros in the place of nosatros / nosaltres. I dare say that in the making of the linguistic map of the Valencian Community the highest number of differentiated isoglosses will correspond to the area of the Low Maestrat.

Here is, then, a case of boundary, which implies the contact of two languages of similar power of expansion, a phenomenon which never takes place as the result of the transmission of the waves of a language to its dialects.

That future map will prove that the irradiation within the Valencian region has its origin in its capital city and not in the far (from a geographical, historical and linguistical point of view) Barcelona. Needless to say that I refer to the centuries-old flow previous to the present circumstances which interfere with the natural process.

And once I have mentioned the hypothetical Valencian linguistic map, a pair of remarks should be made. Once the suitability of drawing a map of all the domain of our language has been admitted, the map of the boundary, or the area of the “transition language” (by the way, transition from what to what?), as it is termed in some map of the “Catalan linguistic domain”, will be sufficient. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that, contrarily to a geological map or a roadmap, the linguistic map is strongly predetermined by the preceding project. There is a managing team that organizes the work, prepares the questionnaire (choosing the isoglosses that are going to be recorded), trains the field workers who, in their turn, choose the local informants who are going to provide the information. It is easily understandable that the results of a process in which the human factor takes part in such a decisive way can vary substantially, that is why we will have to be cautious in its making and very critical with the results. Not in vain, our best specialist in this field notices in the heading of a chapter that “the comparison of the maps confirms the methodological principles”, in relation to which they are elaborated.

On the other hand, a map can be drawn taking into account exclusively lexical features, as Gilliéron did with the French one, or, on the contrary, paying also attention to the phonological variants, as in the case of the German map. As regards the Valencian map, the phonological features must be considered together with the lexical ones, especially in the Southern boundary. d/ Intelligibility: Perhaps the aforementioned criteria of linguistic differentiation are not sufficient for those who are not versed in the issue. They are not. But perhaps a less technical reflection will offer a clearer view of the matter. When it is stated that the Catalan and Valencian languages are both one and the same “because the speakers of a language can fully understand the others and viceversa”, there takes place, again, a wrong overgeneralization. And the mistake lies in the imprecise use of the term understand.

Of course this approach to the question is not much scientific, but, on the contrary, it can be illustrative. But the statement will not be valid in absolute and antithetical terms: “Everything is understood” - “Nothing is understood” - . Both positions can equally be defended because both are false. It is imperative to find out what is meant by the term “understand”.

When one understands as a consequence of an effort of mental translation, whether it is conscious or it is not, the process of understanding is different to the one that takes place in his own language. This process of adaptation, or translation, of part of the received message, is but a clear proof of linguistic estrangement. To understand automatically seven words out of ten, and deduce or guess the meaning of the other three is not the way a speaker understands his own language, in which all the words are direct and automatically and fully understood. I will go back to the concept of linguistic contiguity, this time making reference to Professor Alvar´s clearly formulated argument: “The coincidence of linguistic features just makes them part of a group, but it is not defining. The Romance languages have a number of common features that makes them come together, while each of them has its relevant features that individualize them in contrast with the rest of the dialects (from the Latin, that is understood, I mean, in contrast with the rest of the languages that belong to the same family, the neolatin, or Romance); linguistically they cannot be characterized for their common elements, but for their differences .

Going back to the mentioned example and applying to it this scientific (now without inverted commas) linguistic law, then we have that these common words do not prove the linguistic identity, just the contiguity, the fact that they are all Romance languages; on the contrary, their differences do confirm that they are not the same. These are distinctive features of individualization.

And to mention here the case of the speakers who do not manage their language properly would have been to confuse things further. They are cultivated speakers (in the linguistic sense, that is, the average speaker with a general knowledge of his language). Well then, a little attention to a Catalan TV programme will provide a substantial number of words and expressions unknown for the Valencian listener. It is obvious, but here is a text for those who do not believe it: “Era la meuca bosquetana, que, corrent d´açí d´allí per les valls i per les serres feia seguir als homes i als minyons amb la ferum de la carn. Fins vells xerucs hi havia que li corrien al darrera; fins bordegassos desnerits, que s´hi corsecaven i neulien...”.

This text by Raimón Casellas is called Els sots feréstecs, and it is neither an intellectual nor a specialized passage and, as long as the average Valencian speaker does not understand it, and I am sure that he hardly does, it is an unquestionable proof that this representative text belongs to other language. Veny proposes that if the mutual understanding does not involve serious difficulties in the communication, we are before two dialects; if, on the contrary, important obstacles in communication arise, then we are dealing with two languages. If this is the case, the above text seems a good enough reason to establish the differentiation between the two languages, because it contains those “serious obstacles” that the quotation proposes.

But obviously, it is not necessary to resort to that argument, which confuses the issue in question completely, since as it has already been seen in the cases of the Yugoslavian and Scandinavian languages, the intercommunication between languages is possible. Which cultivated Spanish speaker will have problems to understand the current Galician? And, is the Galician not a language different from the Spanish? The intercomprehension is not a question of dialects or languages, but just a matter of contiguity of diasystems, independently of how they are termed.

I have always thought that Saussure´s book was not just a brilliant or a learned work, but also a monument to common sense, which he set up regardless his time. And in case this last clear remark needs a theoretical support, I will make reference to the old Suisse teacher´s words: “Everybody must agree that people who do not understand one another speak different languages”. And reformulating this idea in the light of the mentioned quotation by Professor Alvar: everybody must agree that people who understand one another “partially” speak different languages, although contiguous. Because the high number of elements that they have in common is not a sign of their being the same language, it just shows that they are related. The existence of significant differences or “distinctive features” does prove that they are different. And it is not me who says so, but Linguistics does. The most simple experience also proves it: the person who has listened to the Galician television “has understood” the language, and, in consequence, nobody says that the Spanish and the Galician are the same language, although in the present day they are closer to each other than the Valencian and the Catalan are.

And considering another perspective, Kluckhohn states that “a language is something else than a system of communication, it is a cosmovision”. It can be said that it is the result of a slow collective process of development, of accepting and refusing possibilities of expression, of accumulating connotations around the nucleus which expresses the terms, sometimes the connotations are of an empirical type, other times they are intuitive or emotional. Let us consider the density of the meaning of a word like mother, or democracy, or disease. Any strange word which substitute them will fulfil the communicative purpose at best, but it will lack the rich potential associations that vivify the word substituted. That is why two different ways of assigning meaning to words are distinguished. If a language was a system of signs of conceptual content only, it would be very easy to translate it. And anyone who has tackled a literary or a humorous text knows well about the difficulties of its translation. And this happens because the words are not inactive signs with just one meaning, but they are living and changeable. Those who believe that an idea is more “scientific” when it is labelled with a technical term must know that it can also be done in this case: it is called semantic marginality or connotating potential of the words, and it is an insignificant detail that makes possible the maximum expression of a language, its literature, which would be unthinkable without that potentiability and explains the effect of estrangement that the Valencian speaker goes through when he comes across a Catalan word, although he understands it.

G. LINGUISTIC AWARENESS

And the last consideration around the methodological definition of the language. Last but not least. Because, in my opinion, it is the strongest argument. Otherwise, the processes of levelling, differentiation and literaturation, which are methodologically defining, would not have taken place. I am referring to the Valencia people´s linguistic awareness, existing for seven centuries now and which it has already been clearly expressed by their classics.

A people, a culture, who are aware of their individuality, knows what language they speak. And it will be useless to try to find, through our history, evidence which contradicts the Valencians´ repeatedly expressed collective awareness of their speaking their own language. It is not easy to deny such a notorious reality from a minimally objective perspective. And, however, once the dogma of the dialectal character of the Valencian language has been established, it is imperative to ignore the historical awareness because, otherwise, it would refute, by itself, the thesis. It is imperative, I repeat, to deny the evidence, and it is denied. I will concentrate on the texts. That is, on a brief selection, on those which seem more concluding to me attending to their categorical conciseness.

Francesc Eiximenis writes in the second half of the fourteenth century: “Ha volgut nostre senyor Déu que el poble valencià sia poble special e elet entre los altres de tota Spanya; car com sia vengut e eixit, per la major part, de Catalunya, e li sia al costat, emperò no es nomena poble catalá, ans per especial privilegi ha propi nom e es nomena poble valenciá.”. Is it necessary a more explicit division? Will a community who denominate themselves Valencian as opposed to Catalan know that they are Valencian and nothing else?

And furthermore: ”Aquesta terra ha llenguage compost de diverses llengües que li son entorn, e de cadascuna ha retingut so que millor li es, e ha lleixat los pus durs e pus malsonants vocables dels altres, e ha presos los millors”. Will it be necessary a thorough exegetic task to conclude that this native of Girona, settled in the Valencia he loved so much and understood so well, individualizes the language among those “around it”? and that this language assimilates of refuses them in relation to its own nature. And these statements were made as long ago as six hundred years.

Antoni Canals is, if possible, more emphatic on that point; around that time he wrote that his Valeri Maxim was “tret en nostra volguda lengua materna valenciana aixi com he pogut, jatsesia que atres l´hagen tret en lengua catalana empero com lur estil sia fort larg...”. It seems that the writer, in a not very ambiguous way, sets up “nostra lengua materna valenciana” (a strange way to refer to a rethorical fashion!) against the “lengua catalana”, which, as far as I know, nobody has said that it was a rethorical variety. Then, why would the author compare two dissimilar meanings of the word “language”? Is it possible such a lack of logical correlation? And if they were just styles, would anybody translate them? Is that possible?

And the last reference that I will not comment (what for?). Our greatest prose writer says that he writes his work in “Vulgar Valencià” (Vulgar Valencia). He says, and repeats, “in Vulgar Valencià”. That is, ordinary Valencian, Valencian of generalized use; Vulgar as opposed to Latin, which was the cultivated language.

Well all this prevailing reality has been changed, by magic, into a stylistic variety of the Catalan language. And that has been done with neither knowledge which supports it, nor historical or rethorical arguments. Just distorting the hypothesis about a text which does not mean what it they say it means. Or on the questionable basis of the meaning of a number of statements out of context. Well then, nowadays this idea, fully accepted, has the category of “scientific”.

It is necessary to look up to the skilful conceptual shifts of the thesis and its extraordinary mixing capability. On the other hand, it must be noted that in Europe, and also in Spain, the generalized term to express the concept attributed to language was rethoric; less extended and, perhaps, less accurate from a semantic point of view, was the word style, documented in Italy back in the thirteenth century and extended all over Europe. Antoni Canals uses it, as seen before, setting it up against the term language.

As regards the awareness of the people, nobody in Valencia has said that Catalan was spoken here. Never till some years ago. Never. Nobody.

II. CONNECTED ISSUES OF DIACHRONIC AND EXTERNAL LINGUISTICS

There are still certain questions, external to the methodological approach, which are essential for the definition of the language: synchrony and internal Linguistics.

If they are peripheral from this point of view, they are not, however, from the perspective of the general controversy of the Valencian language, once this has been defined. Here are, then, some considerations about diachronic and external Linguistics, not as elements of the argument offered previously, but as a complementary approach to it.

A. VALENCIAN ROMANCE EXISTING BEFORE JAMES´ I ARRIVAL

The thesis of the dialectalism of the Valencian language, which holds that it is transferred Catalan, comes across two serious obstacles: the language spoken before the conquest took place and the natural evolutionary dynamism inherent to every language as a result of their being living entities. Here are some slight considerations about these two questions.

The idea of a linguistic resettlement collides with the existence, more and more evident, of a previous Romance language with which the newly arrived language should merge. That is why it is imperative to deny or minimize the part played by the Mozarabs within the Valencian linguistic history. Thus, San Pedro Pascual´s erudition, renowned mozarab of preserved work before the arrival of the settlers, will be denied, or it will be pointed, without hesitation, the non-scientific thesis of the “historical break” of the Valencian evolution, according to which some thousands of invaders took over a country which was completely empty of people and had no culture. Or the arguments will become irrational enough as to explain the differences in relation to the existence of prerromanic languages (completely unknown, or nearly), in order to avoid accepting that they are due to the presence, or not, of “Mozarabs” in the different areas. A people who mostly speak, before James´ arrival, a Romance language, which will be an element of the spoken Valencian eventually, makes some strong objections to the concept of the full transplant of a language. And however, the existence of that preJames´ Romance language leaves no room for uncertainties. Not long ago, Leopoldo Peñarroja, one of the most reputable specialists in Valencian philology issues, wrote categorically: “History, with its detailed information, confirms that the Valencian is not the result of reconquest or medieval repopulation. Nowadays, to think this way is at most a matter of faith, not a scientific conclusion.”

The topic, although fascinating for me, is very extensive, so I will just point out that the jarcha (note: a jarcha is a final stanza of an Arab poetical composition called moaxaja, written in Romance language. The oldest writings of the can be found among this kind of verses) that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries (that is, before, during and after the supposed Almoravid invasion which made all the culture of the Islamic Spain equal) extended all over Al-Andalus, from Lerida to Malaga and from Murcia to Tudela, including Shark Al-Andalus, on which the Kingdom of Valencia will be established, I repeat, the jarchas imply, in Emilio Gómez´s words, a bilingual culture.

Then, it is hard to understand that a scientific perspective refutes such a consistent reality as the one studied, among others, by Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Américo Castro, Pérez de las Cagigas, José Antonio Maravall and Antonio Ubieto, from a historical viewpoint; Puig y Cadafalch and Pijoan, artistically; Menéndez Pidal and Solá-Solé from a philological perspective; García de Diego and Zamora Vicente from a dialectological position; Dámaso Alonso, Frenk de Alatorre and Emilio García Gómez, in the literary field; and Lévi Provençal, Julián Ribera and Asín Palacios, in the field of Arabist studies. Others authors such as Galmés de Fuentes, Mourelle de Lema, Ernesto Veres, Sanchis Guarner, Antonio Ubieto, Leopoldo Peñarroja and Gómez Bayarri have written about the Valencian Mozarabs. The two latter are each of them the authors of a doctoral thesis, defended recently and aimed to shed light on such an important question as it is the existence of a prejames´ time Romance language. And if this list of cultivated researchers, together with those that I forget and omit, seems exiguous, it can be completed with the nearly three hundred and a half titles that Solá-Solé quotes in his book on jarchas. How that reality can be refuted, or ignored is something I do not understand.

I will make a last reflection on this point. If we compare the political map of the Eastern Pirenaic counties of the middle of the eleventh century, when the reconquering expansion for those lands and the so-called “Catalan linguistic domain” begins, then, we can observe the coincidence of the “true Catalonia”, or “Spanish March”, where there were never Mozarabs, with the area of Eastern Catalonia, while the area of Western Catalonia corresponds with the Spanish territory that was under the Islamic domain, which lasted five or six centuries; containing an undeniable Romance linguistic stratum, wrongly called Mozarab, whose undoubted existence is defended by all those reliable specialists in Romance languages who do not support the Catalanist theses.

I insist, let us the maps be compared and the coincidence rejected as something accidental, and lacking historical meaning, or otherwise, it should be explained in scientific terms, or simply, in terms of logical coherence.

B. LINGUISTIC EVOLUTION

The second relevant factor is the historical differentiation. The language is a cultural event and, therefore, historical. But, obviously, the history cannot be chosen. If we situate before it, we can adopt two positions: either trying to negate it in order to theorize about a society without a past which supports it, which is dialectically conceivable (utopia) although impossible in the practice, or understand it as a complete and continuous process. What is not valid is to choose a period, or an aspect, and ignore others, or even negate their existence or proclaim their atypical character and exclude it from the historical sphere. The result of such conceptions has always been understood as manipulation of history. And it was not considered very scientific till not long ago. Pretending that nowadays the language spoken in Valencia is Catalan just because some settled there seven and a half centuries ago, apart from ignoring the character of the settlement, it means something more serious: forgetting about 750 years of Valencian history. And what this history holds is that, and pay attention to this, a group of Catalans, with their language, settle in a moment of its evolution, a moment which is not the starting point. They are neither sufficient to impose it, nor they are operating alone. They are integrated in a historical-cultural stage in which the multiple character of other settlers converges and, above all, there is the previous strong background of a contiguous language. That is why they are just a component of the emerging culture, and that is why the differentiation between the written Catalan and the written Valencian is evident from the very beginning, literally, because a certain amount of autochthonous vocabulary is already found in Els Furs. And the tendency gets more noticeable at a good pace, as it is clearly testified by the strong differentiated linguistic awareness of the Valencian classics a century later.

But the process is not limited to the centuries of splendour of the Valencia language, on the contrary, it extends to the present time because of the totalizing and indivisible character of the history. Well then, at the end of the fifteenth century and for historical reasons common throughout Europe, both Catalan and Valencian accept the Spanish as the language to be used for administrative and cultural purposes, being the vernacular relegated to familiar and local spheres. This situation lasts, as it is already known, up to the , that is, up to the end of the last century. They have been, then, four centuries of mutual isolation of the two linguistic communities during which they have followed independent evolutionary processes. And four centuries are a long time in the history of a language, and even longer if both languages had been distancing from each other progressively the three previous centuries.

Well then, in order to insist in the present identity of two languages, it is necessary to leave aside 750 years of history and go back to the origins which are not so unitary as it has been suggested. Certainly, this is an unusual case in the universal linguistic history.

Professor Vendryes wrote that “the reason why the common language breaks up is because the links which sustain it have weakened”. But this concept is reversible and it can be formulated by saying that when a language extends geographically in such a way that the relation with the original nucleus weakens, at the same time that it merges, following its own dynamics, into multifarious influences of every kind, generational, social economical and cultural and if, besides, we consider the complex and productive relation between the everyday language and the literary expression, then, the transformation is unavoidable. And if this is not a linguistic law, it will be the day when someone with an authority higher than ours states it, because its adequacy to the historically observed processes is constant. In the case of the Valencian language, then, there is a combination of the two factors of linguistic differentiation, geography and history, or expressed in a more neutral way, time, which is the decisive factor, because it determines the lines of change and their density. That is why Saussure asserted that “the space diversity must be called time diversity” in linguistic terms. Both concepts are, clearly, inseparable and they are found in the evolution characteristic of the Valencian language.

I wish to make clear that pointing out the evolutionary divergence between the Catalan and the Valencian languages does not imply their having a common origin. It is a phenomenon independent of it, it happens both between collateral diasystems and between diasystems of original contiguity. That is, it can be found between the quebecois and the , as well as between the Spanish and the Italian.

C. EXTINCTION OF THE LANGUAGES

I have mentioned the fact that the Valencian is object of a deliberate and vigorous relentless chase. That is what means the attempt to reduce it to the category of dialect, which, in case it succeeds, will leave the way open for a progressive and complete “normalització” (standardization), that is, absorption. Perhaps it is worth making a consideration about the dynamics of this process, which is a constant in the history of the languages. Some of them have been absorbed in recent times, like the Dalmatian, or the Polabian from Low Elba in the eighteenth century, or like it had happened before with the Prussian from Dantzing-Koenisberg, which was absorbed by the . Some of them have had their death certificate dated, like the Cornish, which stopped existing 26th November 1777, after Dolly Pentreath´s death, a centenarian who was the last person who spoke it. Or in other circumstances, there is also the case of several North American Indian languages. Nowadays, other languages are still fighting a battle for survival, apparently lost, like the Breton with regard to the French or the Welsh and the Gaelic in relation to the English. These cases are not mentioned because of their closeness to the Valencian one, whose controversy does have no parallel in the linguistic geography of the present time, excepting the distressing Yugoslavian case, but because all of them tend to establish the dynamics of a process of linguistic absorption.

“In order to keep its authority -Dauzat writes- the fights against the dialects related to it, makes them draw back, reduces them to the lowest level little by little, before wiping them out completely.” Let us observe: “national language” and “dialect”. Because the relationship established between these concepts is substantially different to the relationship that exists between two languages in which one of them is absorbed by the other. Here are the terms in which the Valencian case is falsely set up. Because I insist in the fact that those dialects which assume their dialectal character offer no resistance; on the contrary, they adopt an absolutely passive attitude to what they consider just a change that does not alter their existence, since they lack the awareness of individualizing differentiation in the face of external pressure. This explains the cases of quick expansion of the dialect spoken in the Isle of France over the valleys of the Rivers Seine and Loire, becoming in this way the official language; or the expansion of the Tuscan all over Italy in the fifteenth century with the same result, or the quick diffusion of the literary German during the Reformation time, and around which the linguistic unification of Germany is completed. And going a bit further back in time, we find the diffusion, without apparent resistance of Latin over the other dialects of central Italy. The resistance to colonization is, by itself, a clear sign of linguistic awareness that has to be either respected or persuaded using coercion, depending on the circumstances and the disposition of the language which takes over.

Once the process has started, the different formal aspects of the language that spreads are accepted at different speed, what implies establishing different periods. At a first stage it is accepted, with relative ease, a lexicon to which the speakers assign a higher prestige than they would to their own vocabulary, this is frequently the result of the exotic nature of something new. In the case of the Valencian language, which is at this stage, the progress is due to the institutionalization of the other language for official affairs and for its generalized use at school, rather than for what has been previously pointed out. This is the why the number of Catalanisms has increased (doncs, dues, petita, altre and servei, for instance); otherwise, they would have never introduced into the Valencian language.

The second stage is characterized by the morphological changes, especially the verbal changes (condueix for conduix and anàs for anara). If we pay good attention, this feature is more noticeable in the written text than in the spoken discourse, even for the speakers themselves. This is natural, because in the process of selection which every writing task implies, some condicionants which have not been incorporated to the speech yet, because of its spontaneous nature, take place.

Excepting the serious cases of professionalization or as the result of the convert´s enthusiasm, the third stage does not seem to have arrived, I refer to the spontaneous and automatic acceptance of the syntactic structures. One cannot hear expressions such as “totes dues”, or negative sentences using pas, or prepositions in the final position yet. This means that the language taken as model is imitated just at the level in which the expressive process is more spontaneous, less subjected to custom, to the choice of the term, but it also means that people still follow the old patterns. When the languages are distant it is better appreciated the qualitative leap forward that the automatization of the syntactic structures represents in the process of assimilation of a language.

When the pedagogical pressure is not systematic, it may happen that the linguistic acculturation stops at this stage, like it is the case of the so-called “pidgin English” in China, or the equivalent “broken English” of the American Indians (“Long time no see Joe” for “It has been a long time without seeing you, Joe”), a phenomenon which is also found within the Spanish language in certain areas of the Andean Quechua, the same as in the clash between the French and the Oc languages in the south of France until some years ago. When the syntactic structures are closer, like in the case of the Valencian and the Catalan languages, the assimilation is, obviously, easier, and the fact that it has not happened yet, but in a small proportion, is most hopeful.

The phonic level is always the last redoubt to give way to a new one, since this is the most automatic system within the expressive process, and the least affected by the writing practice. That is why when a language borrows a new word, this is always adapted phonologically to the new system. Thus, in Spanish we say fútbol, with a close o and not with the English open o, a sound which does not exist in the Spanish language; and we say concierto, with a dental fricative sound, and not with the alveolar sound of the Italian z. A good example of the articulatory transformation of a word can be observed in the evolution of the word Caesar (with an initial voiceless velar sound), which takes the form kaiser in German, and later Csar in Polish, and Tsar in Russian: these are all cases of adaptation of the word to the articulatory forms characteristic of the language where they are introduced as a result of the automatic rejection of the foreign phoneme. And that is exactly what we do in Spanish when we pronounce zar -with the natural interdental fricative which does not come, as it is evident, from the interdental articulation of the first letter of Caesar-, and from there we get the Valencian sar.

When a new word is inserted in a language in the place of its own, servei for servici, for instance, an offensive arbitrary act is being performed, in the first place, but also a living being is being infected by a dead cell. Its survival will depend on its capacity to assimilate the outside agents which have come inside it. A healthy organism recovers from this kind of aggression. If one day expressions like “Pànsu anà al pòpla a supà amb la mára méva” (a phonological change of this kind would happen, certainly, together with strong morphosyntactic changes) would become widely used among the Valencian people, then we would have to think about a serious case of septicaemia.

D. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Language is not culture. It is just one of its components. This is well-known by the cultural anthropologists, that is, the specialists in the study of culture itself. In order to understand such a simple thing when one owns an authentic cultural sense, it would be sufficient to read Sapir´s book, or the corresponding chapters of Kluckhohn´s, Lowie´s, Kroeber´s, Herskovitz´s of Linton´s works, among others. This general trend has a curious confirmation on the side of the linguists who belong to the group “Wörter und Sachen” (words and things), who, in the inter-war period, maintained, from a theoretical perspective and applied in their studies, the need to study a language rooted in its culture, because it is the only way in which it can be fully understood.

Here is what Malmerg, a well-known linguist, thinks: “A great many different factors, and sometimes opposite one another, lead to linguistic changes; thus, the mechanistic conception of the language supported in the last century has been left behind. The changes can only be totally understood if they are related to the general structure, made up by both the society and the cultural structure, and with the changes that take place within such a structure. The history of language must be the history of the society and the history of culture at the same time”. The statement can be neither more categorical nor more representative of the current considerations of Linguistics and the cultural anthropology.

The science of culture, the cultural anthropology, frequently resorts to the study of early stages of the civilization in order to shed light on its theoretical issues because it is at those stages where the relations of cultural integration are best observed. Well then, a look at the early inhabitants of North America shows that the linguistic family of the atapascos is so culturally differentiated as the Indians from Alaska can be from those living in the prairies, next to the apache Indians and the Navajos. The same can be applied to the diversification of the Arawacos, some of which live in the Amazon area while others are people from the Bolivian high plateau who, preserving their language, can be set within the aymará culture in all other aspects. Or we can have a look at the linguistic and cultural maps of Africa and we will soon notice that the bantus, a strictly linguistic concept, stretch out from the Nigerian subdesert to southern Africa. The anthropologists will not stand by the opinion that so different environments have not produced a change which substantially differentiates the culture of these groups of people along the generations.

The identification of language and culture is so mistaken as it is the fact of defining the latter in terms of familiar structure or social classes, as the sociologists suggest, or in terms of systems of production as the Marxism postulates. On the contrary, Bastide thought, as an art sociologist, that “it is not the system of production, the economic infrastructure, what explains the aesthetical doctrines, quite the reverse, the aesthetical conception of things controls and manages the economic life”. L. L. Bernard thinks, as a good researcher of the collective psychology, that the culture is just a specific system of social psychology, and Joachim Wach, an authority in sociology of the religion, states categorically: “in a figurative sense, the religion is not a branch, but the trunk of the tree”, of a culture, which is basically defined by its religious conceptions.

No: it is the opposite. Culture comes first, and later its specific expressions. Prof. San Valero is clear at this point when he refers to the language: “la llengua es la solucio trobada per la cultura per a satisfacer la necessitat de comunicació entre els homens d´una societat”. (The language is the means used by the culture in order to satisfy the need for communication among the members of a society).

The reduction of the culture to one of its expressions just shows the specialists´ tendency to overvalue its disciplines. The linguists also do so. This has but the charm of ingenuousness.

Unluckily there is another less ingenuous aspect in these reductions: they have been, throughout history, formulas in the service of aggressive ideologies. The comparison of language to culture is such an unfounded myth as racism is. Hitler made use of both concepts for the same purpose: the absorption of neighbouring countries. “If they speak German, they are German”, he stipulated. And then, he invaded a country where people spoke Czech. The comparison of language to culture should not mislead anyone. It is just a dogma complementary to the dialectalism of the Valencian language. Because this latter by itself is not sufficient: the Valencian must be a dialect of the Catalan and, at the same time, it is essential that language is equal to culture. Once both premises have been accepted we will have a “nation” which will just lack a State. And the process of absorption of the “País Valencià” by the great “nació catalana” will be complete, which is the eventual aim. To pretend that all this lot of factual distorsions and conceptual stupidities are just science, is the only way open to this ideology. To pretend not to see it is to be blind and, besides, to close our eyes. Because let us be clear: the problem of the Valencian language is not a scientific one, as it is pretended. It is a political affair.

III. CODA

The thesis of the dialectalism of the Valencian language is not methodologically grounded. It is just assumed. It is just considered a criterion based on authority, but not a criterion based on reason, that is why it is closer to dogma than to science.

The initial methodological concept, on which all attempt of linguistic delimitation must be based, is the concept of contiguity. And such contiguity happens in cases of late differentiation from a language in an advanced stage of formation, as well as in cases of a parallel evolution where there is a common initial point. And example of the first kind is the Portuguese in relation to the Galician; the second case can be illustrated by the Romance languages rooted in the Latin language.

As can be seen neither of these two cases means that necessarily one of them must be a dialect. On the other hand, when this happens, it can be genetically related to the mother tongue, like in the case of the Murcian and the Castilian; or it has an independent origin and, precisely, because of its nature of contiguity and its smaller linguistic awareness, or for other reasons, it can be absorbed, like happened to the Aragonese or to the Leonese. According to this, it is, then, clear that the dialectalism of a linguistic system does not rely on its genetic link with another, and that not every case of contiguity implies, by itself, a case of dialectalism.

Well then, the Valencian and the Catalan are contiguous linguistic systems. Nothing else. And a linguistically hypercentrist and cultural and politically expansionist conception has called dialect to what is just a contiguous linguistic system.

To fix the concept of dialect is not an easy task. The concept of language is more clearly defined. Therefore, the most dialectically effective solution is to show that the Valencian falls within this category and, consequently, exclude its dialectal character. A language is a linguistic system which fulfils the conditions of levelling, differentiation and literaturation. The Valencian language observes these three defining conditions: it is a language.

For delimiting purposes, the differentiation is a essential condition. This differentiation has proved to be sufficient. But here it is not as categorical in these considerations as it will be the day when the circumstances are adequate for the elaboration of the exhaustive elements of differentiation.

In the first place a Valencian-Catalan lexicon. The contrasts will be larger than those existing between the Spanish and any of its dialects. By far. They will be as numerous, or more, as the differences that exist between the Serbian and the Croatian, or between the Czech and the Slovakian. To start with, we cannot speak, in good faith, of synonymy, when we are dealing with relevant features of lexical differentiation (chica bonica – noia maca).

Together with this lexicon (made up by living words, not archaisms), an exhaustive comparative grammar will have to be made up (perhaps it would be better to include a third grammar, the Spanish one).

It will also have to be made a phonetic analysis according to the modern techniques on samples which are adequate and representative enough. Lastly, a map of the linguistic boundary.

It is not difficult to guess that the evidence resulting from this research will be irrefutable in linguistic terms. But, for the moment, there is enough evidence available.

Finally, perhaps it is worth putting forward an objection. It is about the fact that a literature which stopped existing centuries ago has been included in a synchronic analysis. But this is a characteristic that the Valencian has in common with other languages. After the rich Scandinavian medieval epic, those languages stopped being productive literarily up to the nineteenth century, as well as the Galician and the Catalan, for instance. There are languages without a literature, like the Dutch, the Slovakian, the Bulgarian or the Finnish, without losing their condition of language for that reason.

The same could be said about the consideration about the linguistic awareness of the Valencian people. Certainly, it would have been useless to have such an awareness if later it had been lost. The preceding considerations try to prove that the present awareness is not recent but centuries-old. And this does seem a decisive circumstance to me, because although it is not openly expressed in the analysis that has been undertaken, it is implicit in it. If there is not linguistic awareness, the levelling and differentiating features disappear. There does not exist any language which has not got it as a component, because it would have died out without it. That is the essential difference in relation to the dialects. In Astorga, Guadix of Sabiñánigo it is naturally accepted that the Spanish grammar is taught at school and that the authorities and newspapers make use of this language. Because they are within the limits of the dialectalism. The resistance of the Valencian language to the process of Catalanization which is going through is an unquestionable proof of its condition of language. If it was not a language it would not resist to standardization. This should make the “scientifics” who deal with the matter think a little.

Because, although the Valencian is contiguous to other languages, it is a language. I say a language.

Professor J. Ángeles Castello was born in Valencia (Spain) in 1930 and doctorate on the University of Valencia with extraordinary prize the year 1960. Dedicated from always to the teaching, he practised in a beginning in the same University of Valencia, passing afterwards to the USA, in the Alverno College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and in the University of the State of Florida, where maxim reached academic category, being Chief of the Division of Hispanic Studies. In 1977 he reincorporates to the teaching in Valencia where he has practised as Professor of Language and Spanish Literature. He has published some books, for example the "Spanish Literature" (McGraw-Hill, 1970). He has collaborated in numerous articles and works of research in scientific magazines of his speciality, both of Europe and America. For a few years he devotes himself to the study of the Valencian language.

J. Ángeles Castello, naixcut en Valencia en 1930 i doctorat en la seua Universitat, en premi extraordinari, l'any 1960. Dedicat des de sempre a la docencia, l'eixerci en un principi en la mateixa Universitat Lliteraria de Valencia, passant mes tart als EEUU, en l'Alverno College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) i en l'Universitat de l'Estat de Florida, a on alcançà la maxima categoria academica, sent cap de la División de Estudios Hispánicos. En 1977 se reincorporà a la docencia en Valencia a on ha eixercit com a catedratic de Llengua i Lliteratura Espanyola. Ha publicat una Literatura Española (McGraw-Hill, 1970), a mes d'una serie de volums tant idividuals com colectius. Ha colaborat en numerosos articuls i treballs d'investigacio en revistes cientifiques de la seua especialitat, tant d'Europa com d'America. Des de fa uns anys es dedica a l'estudi de la problematica sociopolitica creada entorn a l'especificitat de l'idioma valencià.

ACCIO BIBLIOGRAFICA VALENCIANA. La realisacio d'esta pagina ha segut possible gracies als bons oficis de les següents persones:

—Mª. Olga Sierra Díaz. Llicenciada en Filologia Anglesa per l'Universitat d'Oviedo. Que s'ha fet carrec de la transllacio del text. —Carles Varea i Collado. Diplomat per l'Universitat de Valencia. Estudi General. En qui ha recaigut la part tecnica del proyecte. —Joan C. Prosper i Moret, en el seu esperit immarcescible. —Miquel Castellano i Arolas. Llicenciat en Dret per l'UNED. Qui ha dut avant la direccio i la coordinacio global de les sinergies.