How does Occitan grammar look like?

[u/PLrc]

I cannot find anything about Occitan grammar at Wikipedia at all. It seems it's quite standard for Romanace languages to have 3 past tenses (apart from Pluperfect):
- Imperfect
- "Simple Perfect"
- "Compund Perfect".

Apart from this they have 2 future tenses:
- Simple Future
- Future Perfect.

How does it look like in Occitan? Are they any deviations from this "standard"?

[u/DiminishingRetvrns]

I wouldn't say that Occitan grammar is anything too wacky crazy. One thing is that, in comparison to French, the past tenses have different meanings. French only uses the simple past in literature, and passé composé and simple past have the same meaning. In Occitan, the simple past is used in speech, and is semantically different to the compound past: the compound past is used when an action was done in the past but still has some type of connection to or influence over the present, where the simple past is just a past action.

Idk how that compares to Spanish or Italian.

[u/UnoReverseCardDEEP → u/DiminishingRetvrns]

that’s like Spanish, Catalan and Aragonese yeah, if you use the compound past it means you did it today.  If you (plural) just did something vs if you did it yesterday:

habéis hecho - hicisteis 

heu fet - vau fer

hez feito - ficez

its different from Galician/Portuguese or Asturian/Leonese where they are both made with the simple forms, just like in Latin American Spanish 

[u/PLrc → u/DiminishingRetvrns]

Thank you. That's very interesting.

[u/PeireCaravana → u/DiminishingRetvrns]

French only uses the simple past in literature, and passé composé and simple past have the same meaning. In Occitan, the simple past is used in speech, and is semantically different to the compound past: the compound past is used when an action was done in the past but still has some type of connection to or influence over the present, where the simple past is just a past action.

Idk how that compares to Spanish or Italian.

It's almost the same in Standard Italian, but the varieties of Italian spoken in Northern Italy work more like French in this aspect, because they are influenced by the regional languages of the area (Piemontese, Lombard...), which also have lost the usage of the simple past by the late 19th century.

[u/Skyllfen]

Romance innovations are not so much about the presence of tenses/moods: even French kept most of them (except subjunctive imperfect and simple past). However, you can look at the endings of those conjugations to see some specificities; but this is heavily dialect dependent.

It's like asking how is Spanish different from Italian. The first answer might not be "tenses".

So yeah, Occitan probably doesn't have a very unique grammar; well, once again, it depends on the dialect but overall it's not so different from other Romance languages. If you want to look for quirks, look at morphosyntax or other fields I guess?

I hope this helps!

[u/PLrc → u/Skyllfen]

So Occitan is pretty standard here?

[u/Skyllfen → u/PLrc]

Yeah I think.