Saying

Cover Refreshments or Proverbs in romanceof Hernán Núñez, 1555.

The proverbs is a traditional paremia of popular origin and use –and by definition, of anonymous authorship– with didactic, moral or even philosophical intention. In some contexts it can be found as a synonym of said e even proverbial, although the saying, essentially oral, encompasses a broader meaning, as a set of words that propose a thorough, sharp, timely, and even malicious concept, or else a humorous occurrence. For its part, the proverb, like the adage and the maxim, are usually associated with the cult, the biblical or the oriental. In short, in the field of the Castilian or Spanish language, the proverb is, par excellence, the most representative paremia of popular wisdom.

Use and content

In the use of the Spanish language, the term refrán (from the French refrain, short sentence) has known a great diffusion to the point of displacing proverb, an idea that is associated with a learned paremia such as biblical or oriental proverbs. Thus, the saying, popular or popularized paremia, appears in works by classical authors such as Gonzalo de Berceo, the Archpriest of Hita, Don Juan Manuel, Alfonso X the Wise or Miguel de Cervantes himself, which in Don Quixote asserts through the mouth of Quijano that "the proverbs are brief sentences, drawn from the experience and speculation of our ancient elders", and speaking with Sancho Panza he tells him that "any of what you have said is enough to make your thoughts clear" (Second part, chapter XVII); or when he makes the captive say that & # 34; the proverb is a brief sentence drawn from long and discreet experience & # 34;.

Brief and anonymous sentences that, according to Maldonado, "indicate what attitude should be adopted in each situation, define the reason for a certain behavior, or draw the consequences of a circumstance, in any case entailing a didactic and instructive purpose and turning the anecdote into human being as a subject for reflection". However, many literary and biblical phrases have become part of popular proverbs. Most of the sayings are observations coined by collective experience over time, with topics ranging from the weather to the unchanging and fatalistic fate of existence. They constitute the cultural baggage of the people in times when oral tradition passed popular wisdom from one generation to another.

Their structure is usually paired and they use both prose and verse as well as literary figures (antithesis, ellipsis or parallelism) to facilitate their oral perpetuation.

Origin of the term

The etymology of proverb reveals its origin in the context of Provencal lyric, as part of the lyrics of songs and poems, sung or recited. This is how the terms «refrain» (French) and refranh (Provencal) describe it already in the Middle Ages as «part of the poem that is repeated in each stanza (in pieces of popular development such as «rondeau, virelai, ballade, chant royal», etc.). However, it is absent in the most courteous forms (such as the "grand chant courtois"). When the refrain "changes in each stanza", it can be related to more primitive lyrical structures such as the Mozarabic jarcha". In the current use of the Spanish language, it has been redefined with the word 'estribillo'.

Editions of proverbs

The first known collection of proverbs is attributed to Don Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, under the title Proverbs that old women say after the fire. The ration keeper of the Cathedral of Toledo Blasco de Garay later wrote two Letters in proverbs (Toledo, 1541) that lack the exhaustive purpose of a compilation but are intended to be a pleasant courtly pastime. The first was exclusively proverbs and the second sentences, but in later editions two more anonymous ones were added, one by Juan Vázquez de Ayora and another, extremely distorted, which came from a Sevillian print. This is how they appeared together with Juan de Segura's Processo de letras de amores and Cristóbal de Castillejo's Diálogo de mujeres, edited and moralized, by the way, by Blasco de Garay.

Pedro de Vallés printed the third collection, Book of sayings compiled by the order of A.B.C... containing four thousand and thirty hundred sayings. The most copious that has been printed to date (Zaragoza: Juana Millán, widow of Diego Hernández, at the cost of Miguel Çapilla, 1549), which is the first important one quantitatively speaking. Then came three whose character was profoundly humanistic. The fourth was written by Hernán Núñez, a professor at Salamanca, entitled Sayings or Proverbs in Romance (Salamanca, Juan de Canova, 1555), with a prologue by León de Castro. The Sevillian Juan de Mal Lara, a disciple of both, published another, La Philosophia vulgar, Seville, Hernando Díaz, 1568. On the other hand, Sebastián de Horozco, who also studied in Salamanca, wrote a Collection of proverbs and adages, which consists of 8,311 arranged alphabetically, but whose manuscript has survived incomplete, lacking those that should be gathered in the letters A, B, C and D. What remains was printed in 1916 with the title of Universal Theater of Proverbs. Finally, Gonzalo Correas compiled a long manuscript entitled Vocabulario de refranos y frases proverbiales that was not printed until centuries later, and almost completely incorporated the work of Vallés. XVII century published other scholarly proverbs such as Juan Sorapán de Rieros and Jerónimo Martín Caro y Cejudo, among others.

Among the long list of later compilations, we can mention, for example –and as a guide– those by Luis Martínez Kleiser (Spanish general ideological proverbs of 1953), the Spanish agricultural proverbs by Nieves de Hoyos or the Dictionary of proverbs with comments by Regino Etxabe, from 2012.