occitan

Many of the words that were mentioned here are borrowed from the Occitan language.

For example I would expect the enclaves of Occitan speakers in far southern Italy would show up.

At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyond.

But there's always the possibility that the word lingered for a century or three in some intermediate dialect like Occitan or Catalan before making it into Spanish.

> it can even perfectly translate endangered languages like Occitan How do you know?

An interesting fact is that King Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner)'s mother was from South West France and he grew up there, and so he spoke French and Occitan but not really English.

> I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect Ask French how they've managed to (almost) eradicate the Occitan and Breton and spread the Parisian dialect as the offical variant of French language throughout the country.

One more stretch and you'd get "west-side Spanish" for Portuguese, or some sort of "gaelic Spanish" for Occitan.

We had Occitan and Provincal and Breton spoken, it's only in the past ~200 years or so that industrialization has given a "uniform" culture.

Eleanor spoke not "French", but Lengadòc or Occitan.

Etymological fun: both "mistral" and "magistral" mean "masterly." Mistral comes from Occitan for masterly, although today as far as I know it's only used in English when talking about mediterranean winds.

In particular, there are two dots in Spain and one in France, which means that a few are missing (Occitan, Portuguese and Breton are missing).

Occitan is fairly similar to Italian, so I can make out what a sentence means without fully understanding the language myself.

I believe I've identified the cipher as a positional homophonic substitution encoding bilingual Latin-Occitan pharmaceutical text.