Andalusi Romance, also called Mozarabic, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance that were spoken in Al-Andalus, the parts of the medieval Iberian Peninsula under Islamic control. Romance, or vernacular Late Latin, was the common tongue for the great majority of the Iberian population at the time of the Umayyad conquest in the early eighth century, but over the following centuries, it was gradually superseded by Andalusi Arabic as the main spoken language in the Muslim-controlled south.
The medieval Ibero-Romance varieties were broadly similar (with Castilian standing out as an outlier). Andalusi Romance was distinguished from the others not by its linguistic features primarily, but rather by virtue of being written in the Arabic script.[López-Morillas, Consuelo (2000). "Language". The literature of Al-Andalus. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521471596.004. ISBN 9781139177870.] What is known or hypothesized about the particular linguistic features of Andalusi Romance is based on relatively sparse evidence, of which the Kharja, or closing lines of an Andalusi Muwashshah poem, are the most important.
Names
The traditional term for the Romance varieties used in al-Andalus is "Mozarabic", derived from
Mozarabs, (from the ) a term used to refer to Arabized Christians in al-Andalus.
In the context of medieval Iberia, the term is first documented in Christian sources from the 11th century; it was not used by Muslims to describe Christians.
Some scholars dislike the term for its ambiguity. According to Consuelo Lopez-Morillas:
It has been objected that the term straddles ambiguously the realms of religion and language, and further implies, erroneously, that the dialect was spoken only by Christians. The very form of the word suggests (again a false perception) that it denotes a language somehow related to Arabic.
To describe the varieties of Romance in al-Andalus, Spanish scholars are increasingly using romance andalusí (from the ), or Andalusi Romance in English.
Speakers of Andalusi Romance, like speakers of Romance anywhere else on the peninsula, would have described their spoken language simply as " ladino", i.e. Latin.[This coincides with the Italian name for the Ladin language, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in northern Italy.][Wright 1982: 158] Arab writers used the terms [Wright 1982: 156, 158] or (العَجَمِيَّة, from , 'non-Arab') or Ajami.
History
Umayyad conquest
Romance was the main language spoken by the population of Iberia when the Umayyads conquered Hispania in 711.
Under Muslim rule, Arabic became a superstrate prestige language and would remain the dominant vehicle of literature, high culture, and intellectual expression in Iberia for five centuries (8th–13th).
Over the centuries, Arabic spread gradually in Al-Andalus, primarily through conversion to Islam.[ Cited in ] By about 1260, Muslim territories in Iberia were reduced to the Emirate of Granada, in which more than 90% of the population had converted to Islam and Arabic-Romance bilingualism seems to have disappeared.
Archival record
What is known or hypothesized of the particular linguistic features of Andalusi Romance is based on relatively sparse evidence, including Romance topographical and personal names, legal documents from the Mozarabs of Toledo, names in botanical texts, occasional isolated romance words in the
zajal poetry of
Ibn Quzman, and Pedro de Alcalá's
Vocabulista.
The Kharjas
Samuel Miklos Stern's rediscovery in the late 1940s of Romance present in some of the
Kharja, the final verses in poetry otherwise written in
Arabic and
Hebrew language, illuminated some morphological and syntactic features of Andalusi Romance, including sentence rhythms and phrasal patterns.
Influences
Other than the obvious
Arabic influence, and remnants of a pre-Roman substratum, early Mozarabic may also have been affected by
African Romance, which would have been carried over to the Iberian Peninsula by the Berbers who made up most of the Islamic army that conquered it and remained prominent in the Andalusi administration and army for centuries to come. The possible interaction between these two Romance varieties has yet to be investigated.
[Francisco Marcos-Marín 2015]
Language use
Mozarabic was spoken by
(Christians living as
),
Muwallad (natives converted to Islam), Jews, and possibly some of the ruling Arabs and Berbers. The cultural and literary language of the Mozarabs was at first Latin, but as time passed, it came to rather be Arabic, even among Christians.
Due to the continual emigration of Mozarabs to the Christian kingdoms of the north, Arabic toponyms are found even in places where Arab rule was ephemeral.
Mozarabic had a significant impact on the formation of Spanish language, especially Andalusian Spanish, and served as a vehicle for the transmission of numerous Andalusi Arabic terms into both.
Scripts
Because Mozarabic was not a language of higher culture, such as
Latin or
Arabic, it had no standard writing system. Numerous
Latin documents written by early Mozarabs are, however, extant.
[Gil 1973]
The bulk of surviving material in Mozarabic is found in the choruses (or ) of Andalusi lyrical compositions known as , which were otherwise written in Arabic.[Wright 1982: 161] The script used to write the Mozarabic kharjas was invariably Arabic script or Hebrew script, less often the latter. This poses numerous problems for modern scholars attempting to interpret the underlying Mozarabic. Namely:[Craddock 1980: 13–14]
-
Arabic script:
-
did not reliably indicate vowels
-
relied on diacritical points, quite often lost or distorted when copying manuscripts, to distinguish the following series of consonants: b-t-ṯ-n-y; ğ-ḥ-ḫ; d-ḏ; r-z; s-s̆; ṣ-ḍ; ṭ-ẓ; '-ġ; f-q; and h-a (word-finally)
-
rendered the following consonants in similar ways: r-w-d, ḏ; '-l-k (word-initially); ', ġ-f, q-m (word-initially and medially); n-y (word-finally)
-
had no specific means to indicate the following Romance sounds: /p, v (β), ts, dz, s̺, z̺, tʃ, ʎ, ɲ, e, o/
-
Hebrew script:
-
also did not reliably indicate vowels
-
rendered the following consonants in similar ways: r-d; g-n; y-w; k-f; s-m (word-finally)
The overall effect of this, combined with the rampant textual corruption, is that modern scholars can freely substitute consonants and insert vowels to make sense of the kharjas, leading to considerable leeway, and hence inaccuracy, in interpretation.[Craddock 1980: 15]
Phonological features
It is widely agreed that Mozarabic had the following features:
-
The diphthongs /au̯, ai̯/, the latter possibly changed to /ei̯/
-
Diphthongization of stressed Latin /ŏ, ĕ/
-
Palatalization and affrication of Latin /k/ before front vowels to /tʃ/
-
Retention of Latin /j/ before front vowels
-
Shift of the feminine plural /-as/ to /-es/
The following two features remain a matter of debate, largely due to the ambiguity of the Arabic script:
-
Palatalization of Latin /nn, ll/ to /ɲ, ʎ/
-
Lenition of intervocalic Latin /p t k s/ to /b d ɡ z/
-
Much of the controversy over the voicing of Latin has centered on the Arabic letters Qāf and Ṭāʾ, which in fact had both voiced and voiceless pronunciations in different varieties of Arabic. It is likely that both pronunciations were found in the Iberian Peninsula.
-
Ramón Menéndez Pidal has shown (sporadic) evidence of voicing in Latin inscriptions from the south of the Iberian Peninsula in the second century AD.
-
There are a few cases of original Latin being represented with indisputably voiced consonants in Arabic, like , , and .
Sample text
Presented below is one of the few
kharjas whose interpretation is secure from beginning to end. It has been transcribed from a late thirteen-century copy in Hebrew script, but it is also attested (in rather poor condition) in an Arabic manuscript from the early twelfth century.
[Craddock 1980: 4–6]
|
|
| | | What shall I do, or what shall become of me,
my friend?
Don't take yourself from me. |
Another
kharja is presented below, transcribed from Arabic script by García Gómez:
[García Gómez 1965: 82–85]
|
|
| | | My lord Ibrahim,
oh what sweet name,
come to me
at night.
If not, if you do not want to,
I will go to you
—tell me where!—
to see you. |
However the above
kharja, like most others, presents numerous textual difficulties. Below is Jones's transcription of it, with vowels inserted and uncertain readings italicized.
[Jones 1988: 33] Note the discrepancies.
See also
Notes
Bibliography
