which are often heard among the people. This was the first step. The
second step taken arose from the necessity of making this speech of the
illiterate capable of elevated expression. Mistral claims to have used
no word unknown to the people or unintelligible to them, with the
exception that he has used freely of the stock of learned words common
to the whole Romance family of languages. These words, too, he
transforms more or less, keeping them in harmony with the forms peculiar
to the _langue d'oc_. Hence, it is true that the language of the
Félibres is a conventional, literary language, that does not represent
exactly the speech of any section of France, and is related to the
popular speech more or less as any official language is to the dialects
that underlie it. As the Félibres themselves have received all their
instruction and literary culture in the French language, they use it
among themselves, and their prose especially shows the influence of the
French to the extent that it may be said that the Provençal sentence, in
prose, appears to be a word-for-word translation of an underlying French
sentence.

Phonetically, the dialect offers certain marked differences when
contrasted with French. First of all is the forceful utterance of the
stressed syllable; the Provençal has post-tonic syllables, unlike the
sister-speech. Here it may be said to occupy a sort of middle position
between Italian and Spanish on the one hand, and French on the other;
for in the former languages the accent is found in all parts of the
word, in French practically only upon the final, and then it is
generally weak, so that the notion of a stress is almost lost. The
stress in Provençal is placed upon one of the last two syllables only,
and only three vowels, _e_, _i_, _o_, may follow the tonic syllable. The
language, therefore, has a cadence that affects the ear differently from
the French, and that resembles more that of the Italian or Spanish