L’aportació de Modest Prats a la Història de la llengua catalana

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, this work undertakes an assessment of the contribution of catalan professor Modest Prats to the discipline of language history. Apart from some aspects of his personality, it explains why his project, only partially carried out, of an university manual on the History of the Catalan language, in collaboration with Josep Maria Nadal, represented an epistemic break with respect to previous works in this sphere, some of them of a sporadic nature on specific aspects, others of a very generic nature. The historical-linguistic discourse that the author builds in his works and the underlying ideology are also analyzed in detail. In short, this work reflects on the fact that linguistic history is a field in which, clearly, the development of the discipline elaborates, develops and outlines the object of study itself. This explains the transcendence of the academic labour of Prats in favor of the history of the Catalan language.