It was believed that the first Ibero-Romance literature began with the anonymous epic poem, the Poema del Cid, written around 1140AD. However, in 1948, Hebrew scholar Samuel M. Stern published 24 jarchas, "short lyric poems written in very archaic Spanish," which he had found in a synagogue in Cairo. Stern and Spanish scholar Emilio García Gómez later found more jarchas, and since 1948 their sum total is over fifty. The jarcha is usually the lament of a lower-class woman for her absent sweetheart. It is the final three or four lined stanza of the muwashshah, a form of verse used by Arabic and Hebrew poets from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The jarcha is written in Mozarabic, a Romance language spoken by the majority of the population during this period. Because the Arabic and Hebrew characters lacked certain vowel signs, scholars have trouble transliterating the jarchas. The lack of knowledge of the Mozarabic language also hinders interpretations. Nonetheless, it is now widely accepted that Mozarabic was a separate Romance language which evolved directly from Vulgar Latin, not from Castilian Spanish.
Rate and comment
