We are a group of researchers at the Universidad de Alcalá (Alcalá: beautiful town near Madrid where Cervantes was born 1547, some 50 years after cardinal Cisneros founded our university). Our team GITHE works directly with manuscripts and documents to study the history of the Spanish language.
All the members of the team share the conviction that studying archival documents is fundamental in order to gather evidences about the use of language in past periods. Documents are teeming with information about the language of the past!
It will be said the documents preserved in archives are linguistically monotonous and formulaic, thematically limited. This is only partly true: many documents by notaries are formulaic, but archives also hold documents written by other users: teachers wrote to the town council to beg to receive their wages at last, nuns wrote to get the town plumber to repair a pipe, poor people got other to write for them to beg for alms. In all these documents we find instances of real use of language and of real use of writing.
For example, the Real Academia Española (Ortographia, 1741, p. 40) writes disparagingly about persons who write as those would draw who would draw separately the arm, head, hand, and so on («este no fuera retrato parecido, sino destrozo verdadero», «this would not be a portrait, but a demolition»). And who writes so? Those, says the Academia, who, when they write, divide the syllables or letters of one word, and join words: this is a «defecto comun en las mugeres, y algo usado en los poco doctos», «an error usual in women, and sometimes found in the not-so-well educated (men)». Well, I have to say I am happy, as a linguist, to find such a lovely statement! But is it true?
To investigate the truth of assumptions like this one, we have to look at the documents. There’s no way out of it! Manuscript texts written by women, manuscript texts written by traders, carpenters, grocers, farmers… In archival documents, besides knowing the date and place of writing, we also usually know who was the writer, and all this we seldom find in other manuscript texts. As to printed texts, as many graphical traits were changed from the author’s to those preferred by the editor, we cannot be sure about the original solutions chosen by the authors, and moreover, few people’s writing ever went to press, whereas many people did write for their own use and communication.
In fact, it seems to be true that less fluent writers do join and divide words in a different way than expert ones. As for women, we still don’t have enough documents to be absolutely sure about it. It’s possible many of them do (for the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries) but not because of their gender – it seems to be more connected to the writing ability of the writer, and women did not receive an education comparable to that of men in these centuries, nor had they normally to write often.
Read on on this site! We have also posted in English about
a mysterious Snow White motive in an Inquisition’s document from the 18th century: Snow White at the Inquisición – with a demonic possession as side order,
the hard days when streetsweepers had to sweep more than just dirt: Spanish streetsweepers of yore,
a judge at Alcalá University who divorced a woman from a violent husband – in the 17th century!: Divorce in the 17th century? The case of Francisca de Pedraza.
Belén Almeida
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Photo: Belén Almeida
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