Cobla

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A lyrical form of poetry originating in Occitan literature, involving a specific stanzaic structure and often linked to folk music
2. A type of stanza commonly used in medieval Occitan songs, characterized by its refrains and rhythmic patterns
3. A poetic composition traditionally employed in the Occitan language, distinguished by its unique format and musicality

Etymology: Cobla is a term from Occitan poetry, the Provençal lyric tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it means a stanza or strophe. The word is a borrowing from Old Occitan, where it denoted a couplet or a group of verses bound together by shared rhymes and a common melodic form. Its ancestor is the Latin "copula," meaning a bond or link, the same root that gives English "couple." The idea was that the lines of a stanza were joined together, much as two things are coupled. That sense of linking carries over into how the troubadours used the term. A cobla was not simply any group of lines but one unit in a song, repeated in a pattern through the poem, so the word named the stanza as a structural bond within the whole composition. Medieval Catalan and Spanish later adopted the same term, so "cobla" also survives in those languages for a verse or a folk song.