User:Shirly Ogre/Renat Botet

Shirly Ogre/Renat Botet

Renat Botet (Orellà, Conflent, 1922 - Ceret, 23 June 2012) was one of the most prolific scholars of the Catalan Language in Northern Catalonia. He is recognised for his work as a teacher, theatre director , dialectologist and lexicographer in Catalan, which is primarily reflected in his Diccionari català-francès (2001) and Vocabulari Rossellonès (1997). He is also known for his active role in the creation of the Atlas Linguistique des Pyrénées Orientales (ALPO).

Renat Botet's signature

The Northern Catalan writer Joan-Daniel Bezsonoff described him as a "delicious man, with a peasant's sense of humour and a scholar's erudition”.

Biography

Initial years

He was the fourth and last son of a poor family of pastoralists in Orellà. He attended the school in Prada without losing his sense of connection with the land, to which he would return during the holidays to help his family. The non-existence of Catalan studies at university level led Botet to enrol on the course in Hispanic Studies at the University of Montpelier and at the University of Tolosa de Llenguadoc, where the doctors Joan Amade and Josep Sebastià Pons initiated him in the study of the languages and literatures of Spanish and Catalan. The second world war interrupted his studies when he was sent to Germany on behalf of the Service du Travail Obligatorie (STO) to rescue, without success, his older brother, who had gone there previously.

Academic career

After the war, he worked as a primary school teacher in the Department Pyrénées Orientales and then as a secondary school teacher at Béziers, Albi, Narbonne and Perpignan. During this period he became acquainted with Doctor Enric Guiter, author of the Atlas Linguistique des Pyrénées Orientales (ALPO), a language atlas that aimed to record the speech of the Rosselló area by conducting questionnaires with speakers in the territory. Botet participated in this process by carrying out surveys in 16 villages in the Conflent and Vallespir districts between 1947 and 1951.

Subsequently he worked at the Academy of Nice as a professor of Spanish and then after being sent to Lézignan, he moved to Ceret where he joined the Liceu Déodat de Séverac and the Joan Amade primary school, which Botet was instrumental in getting named after his former teacher.

Activity and contributions

The cover of the "Vocabulari Rossellonès" published by Trabucaire

In 1922 he founded the Escola catalana de Ceret (Catalan School of Ceret), which was open to anyone and was where he taught Catalan based on the orthographic norms laid down by Pompeu Fabra. At the same time he founded the Font-Freda theatre group, which would put on performances in Ceret and the surrounding area of farces and comedies by the author Pere Guisset, such as La gossa d’en Pepet and La Mare-llenga. The performances had a pedagogical purpose insofar as they emphasised the importance of saving Catalan language and culture.

In addition to his teaching and theatrical activities, he conducted many language surveys, collecting thousands of records which he used to create a general dictionary of the Catalan language with citations from Northern Catalan authors. He started the project in 1994 in collaboration with Doctor Cristià Camps from the Université Paul-Valéry de Montpelier. Three years later, Botet published the Vocabulari Rossellonès amb traducció en Francès i en Català normatiu, which was the fruit of years of reading and conversations with rural workers, artisans and fishermen in Northern Catalonia. In 2001 the Diccionari català-francès was published by the Enciclopèdia catalana. In 2007 the Dictionnaire français-catalan was published by the Northern Catalan publishing house El Trabucaire. He collaborated again with Camps on the Diccionari català-francès d'expressions, locucions i refranys, published in 2006.

• Vocabulari Rossellonès / Vocabulaire Roussillonnais, (1997)
• Proverbis / Proverbes, (1998)
• Diccionari català-francès, (with Cristià Camps, 2001)
• Dictionnaire français-catalan d'expressions, locutions et proverbes (with Cristià Camps, 2006)
• Diccionari català-francès d'expressions, locucions i refranys (with Cristià Camps, 2006)
• Dictionnaire français-catalan (with Cristià Camps, 2007)