The word comes from the Latin 'GERMANUS ’, brother . At the beginning of the 16th century, the Germanía was the 'brotherhood formed by the guilds of Valencia and Mallorca that promoted a war against the nobles'; Starting from Valencia, a city where the bad life had developed enormously, it spreads as a translational use to designate the people of the underworld and their jargon . Rodrigo de Reinosa in his Romances , Feliciano de Silva in his Segunda Celestina and Juan Hidalgo in his Vocabulary and in the Romancero they divulge this term ('germanía') as well as 'german' and 'germán'=ruffian; 'german'=prostitute; 'germanic' and 'germanesque'=related to germania. It goes without saying that this cryptic language was in constant evolution precisely to maintain its indecipherable condition and that the members of the justice system and those "damaged" by the criminals could not understand what they arranged and plotted.
A speech that is difficult to understand
The documentation we have of this language comes to us through the literature , and therefore sublimated, when its period of validity in real life had practically run out. This "fossilization" does not prevent us, however, from seeing that there were different eras in Germania and that the terms used in literature are reliable. This jargon spread, from its actual use in the street, through literature in verse and prose, in the sheets of string and in the theater. There is a before and after in the evolution of germanía marked by the appearance in 1609 of a lexicographical work already mentioned:the Vocabulario de germanía of the anonymous Juan Hidalgo, generic name at that time, pseudonym under which Cristóbal de Chaves possibly hides. , lawyer at the Royal Court of Seville, author of the Relationship of the Seville Prison , written at the end of the 16th century. Juan Hidalgo says it well in one of his Romances :“Speak new germania / because he is not dehorned (=discovered); / that the other was very old / and the villains glimpse (=understand) it” (1609, Romances de germanía de Juan Hidalgo [Romancero general], Agustín Durán, Rivadeneira (Madrid), 1851, p. II, 595).
Before this first dictionary, the different writers who use the jargon they do so by explaining the terms they use, such as "giving a lesson" (this is what happens in Lope de Rueda or inCervantes ); after fixing the germania voices in this Vocabulary its productivity becomes protean, its use is extended and so many explanations are no longer given to the reader. The list of words referred to by Lope de Rueda in one of the Pasos de el is quite striking. , and which differs, of course, in various voices and nuances from those recorded, fifty years later, in the Vocabulary of Juan Hidalgo; Rueda tells us (I give the equivalents corresponding to the Vocabulary in parentheses):“Cazorla:I am very happy. Be vigilant, my children. We studied thieves call our shoes calcurros ('calcos' in Juan Hidalgo); to the calzas, suspenders ('alares' and 'shells' in J.H.); to the doublet, fair ('tight' in J.H.); to the shirt, file; al sayo, zarzo ('sarzo' in J.H); to the cape, red:to the hat, poniente (also 'felt'); to the cap, tall; to the sword, washdown; to the dagger, calete ('descuerna-stepfathers' in J.H.); to the buckler, round; to the hull, seat; to the jaco, seven souls; to the skirt of the woman, bell; to the mantle, sernicalo; Savoyard style, warm; to the sheet, dove (‘dawn’ in J.H.); to bed, piltra (in J.H. 'piltra' and also 'trinquete'); to the rooster, canturro (‘capiscol’ in J.H.); to the hen - keep in mind, my children, it has four names - gourd, pecks in the ground, onion and stone. (in J.H. ‘gomarra’ and ‘stone’)” (1545-1565, Lope de Rueda, Pasos , ed. by José Luis Canet, Madrid, Castalia, 1992, p. 298).
In his Rinconete and Cortadillo , published in 1613, but composed before the appearance of the Vocabulary in 1609, Cervantes felt obliged to explain to his curious reader the terms of the jargon that the protagonists of his exemplary novel use; note that in this author the use of the word 'germania' always refers to the language of the underworld:
Criminals and ordinary people
The germania, then, is renewed as soon as the terms have spread or become understandable to those who do not belong to the underworld. Sometimes the same word remains valid but another meaning is assigned to it, and other times a new synonym is chosen. In fact, there are true "families" of terms and multiple synonyms for the same concept; This is the case with words like 'puta' and its various synonyms with nuances about age ('olla' or 'cobertera'), quality ('tronga', 'marca', 'iza', 'piltraca', 'coima' ), the greater or lesser experience of the one he exercises ('mundane', 'first', 'margaritona') and other characteristics ('tomajona', 'tributaria', 'trucha'); the same happens with 'murcio', which is the generic name used to designate the 'thief', along with other nouns that give notice of the time the thief steals ('early morning') or what he steals (' capeador', 'rustler', etc.), or how he steals ('guzpatarero' =butronero), etc. Precisely for this reason there will be entries in the dictionary (capeador, cuatrero, early morning, guzpatarero...) that will refer to the general one, which encompasses all the voices of the same semantic field (murcio). In Cervantes and Quevedo many of these synonyms are found along with others that are their own metaphors. The most common formation mechanisms for this lexicon are metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy, that is, the transformations of meaning , more frequent than those of the signifier. To give two examples of Cervantine neologisms, I think it is noteworthy, first of all, that of 'canary', which is the prisoner who confesses his crime, usually on the rack; the metaphor created by Cervantes in his entremés The widowed ruffian called Trampagos (composed at the end of 1613, beginning of 1614) comes from the song of the bird:just as the canary (bird) sings, the prisoner “sings” (confesses) under torture; in the Vocabulary of Juan Hidalgo this concept was expressed with the voice 'singer'. Secondly, we come across another creation, that of the 'moving houses', which are in the comedy Pedro de Urdemalas; With this metaphor, Cervantes refers to the 'galleys' in which the condemned row, that is, they are the dwellings (houses) of the galley slaves and they are “movable” because they sail in them (see “La pena de galeras y the forced ” in Desperta Ferro Especiales XIV).
There are notablelexical differences between the speech of the inmates who are in jail and that of the delinquents who "exercise" freely in the street and between them and the cheats. We must also distinguish between Germania as such and the "condiments" that surround it:popular sayings, vulgar expressions, which are common to all the people without having to belong to the underworld.
According to the scholar José Hesse (cfr . his introduction to the Romancero de germanía of Juan Hidalgo, Taurus, Themes of Spain, Madrid, 1967) three columns of the underworld can be distinguished:ruffians and checks, thieves and rogues or vilhanos (dedicated to cards, gamblers). They have an iron hierarchy among themselves –you can clearly see it in the courtyard of Monipodio cervantino– and they have a curious relationship with women, always one of exploitation, although with some difference:only the checks have first class women, harlots, yes, but category; the checks offer protection in exchange for living on them and at the same time maintain an intimate relationship. The thieves have daifas of lower category and the rogues do not have the habit of getting together with women, concentration for trickery is fundamental and they do not want "distractions", in addition to the fact that for their "job" they do not usually use them. As José Luis Alonso Hernández expands (in his Léxico del Marginalismo ) this lexicon is used by prostitutes, ruffians, bullies, gamblers and tricksters, thieves, swindlers and liars, in addition to being extended to beggars, kitchen rogues, cuckolds, arbitrists, charlatans, peddlers and even drunkards. That is why we find it in literary works of different genres:in romances, jácaras, picaresque novels, match-making literature, in comedies and in short plays; It is interesting to see, in this last theatrical field, the evolution of this jargon from the footsteps of Lope de Rueda (16th century), the different entremeses of the 17th century and the farces of the 18th century. But without a doubt, one of the most important literary genres for the dissemination of Germania has been jácaras in its four modalities:the poetic, the musical, the theatrical and the jácaras of events; I made this last subgenre known in 2010 and it has a tone and purpose opposed to the rest of Jácaras and, in general, to the literature in which Germanía is usually used. The first three sub-genres of jácaras were intended to entertain and amuse the public (reader, listener or viewer, depending on the sub-genre) and were moments in the life of the criminals told, perhaps with grace, others with irony, by themselves, without any tragic or sorrowful tone. The purpose of the jácaras of events, a kind of “black chronicle” of the Golden Age, was to scare and intimidate the listener of the event that he narrated, full of hair-raising and bloody details, not just the criminal, but someone close to the justice or power. The morality was therefore non-existent in the theatrical, poetic and musical jácaras, making the malefactor almost a hero; however, those of events had a clearly exemplary purpose, and in them the criminals were treated as fearsome scum so that the listener would be frightened and not fall into delinquency, since they were shown the crime and the penalty, in short, the punishment with all its crudeness.
In the picaresque , not without a background of social criticism, the reader's sympathy was aroused by the thugs who populated its pages and thus the language of germania ran for good; It was enthroned in the comedy pens, where laughter and carefreeness made the public ask loudly for jácaras and other pieces in which thugs and harlots intervened, and finally, in the journalistic chronicles that were the "jácaras of events" , much less literary pieces, we find a change of intention, tone and protagonist, as well as a lesser use of this jargon, since it is important that the listener of the event fully understand what has happened and what may come his way.
This language became literature in the pages of Rodrigo de Reinosa, Lope de Rueda, Agustín de Rojas Villadrando, Juan Hidalgo, Quiñones de Benavente, Salas Barbadillo, Cristóbal de Castillejo, Mateo Alemán, Quevedo, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón and many more. We must not forget, however, that "when the river sounds, water carries" and in many cases life has become literature; real-life criminals such as Mellado or Escarramán have been immortalized in the funniest pages of the noblest authors:Mellado remained in everyone's memory thanks to Calderón, among others; As far as Escarramán is concerned, in addition to being immortalized by three jácaras from Quevedo (Letter from Escarramán to Méndez , Méndez's response to Escarramán and the Will of Escarramán ) has traveled through the works of multiple authors, from Lope de Vega to Quiñones, and, among them, one of Salas Barbadillo:
Always in this regard, as an example between life and literature, suffice it to remember the "double life" of the poet-thug, Alonso Álvarez de Soria, son of nobles put in check.
Perdurations
The persistence of the germanía reaches our days, which is understandable:whenever there is marginality there will be an encrypted code. To put two brief examples, the cheli of 20th-century Madrid has many words in common with the Germanic language of the Golden Age (most of the metaphors taken from Cervantes and Quevedo:glanders, amuermarse, open, basca, narrow, tracings, sing, raw, china, wood, mogollón, mono, roll, sobar, etc.); the same happens with lunfardo in the Buenos Aires of tango and Boca, a curious mixture of German exported by galley slaves and miscreants from across the seas, standard Italian (bochar, facha tosta, furbo, gamba...) and dialect (given by emigrants gone to Argentina:mainly Neapolitan and Sicilian from the south of Italy, Piedmontese and Veneto from the north) and some indigenous voices (among them 'gaucho', from Guarani), as well as expressions from French and English; a special and fruitful mixture or koiné It is the one that gives rise to the lunfardo, which preserves voices from the Germanic Golden Age such as bolín, boliche, bodrio, fajar, gato, gabion, hook, garbito, trout, and many others.
Bibliography
- Alonso Hernández, J. L. (1976):Lexicon of Golden Age marginalism. Salamanca:University of Salamanca.
- Alonso Hernández, J. L. (1979):The language of Spanish criminals in the 16th and 17th centuries:Germanía. Salamanca:University of Salamanca.
- Di Pinto, E. (2006):“Cervantes and the underworld:a walk through the language of the underworld”, in Popular Cultures. Electronic Magazine , 2 (May-August 2006).
- Reinosa, R. de (1988):German poetry, ed. de Chamorro Fernández, M. I. Madrid:Viewer.