Part III. History

Lesson 19. The Morisco system

This is how the Moriscos wrote Castilian and Aragonese, 15th to 17th century. Learn it to read the manuscripts, not to journal.

The full table [attested]

From Galmés de Fuentes's transliteration criteria, as reproduced in Vázquez Macías 2023:

The heavy letters ص, ض, ط, ظ and ع turn up mostly in Arabic words. Wikipedia also reports ط and ق for t and k in some positions. ه is h: Old Spanish still had an aspirated h in many words.

Things the table leaves out

• Helper vowels. Manuscripts regularly insert a vowel inside consonant clusters; modern editions leave it out. The Portuguese texts do the same (Lesson 20).
• Inconsistency. Shadda on x is uneven, and spellings vary between manuscripts and scribes.
• Maghrebi script. Many manuscripts use the North African forms of fāʾ and qāf, with the dots in different places (Wikipedia).

Worked example

dixo Yúçuf a sus ermanos · دِشُّ يُسُفْ أَ شُشْ أَارْمَنُشْ

• dixo: d with kasra, x as شّ, final o as ḍamma.
• Yúçuf: y as ي, ç as س, f with sukūn.
• a: seat with fatḥa.
• sus: ش both times.
• ermanos: e seat (أَا), r with sukūn, s as ش.

Reading the Wikipedia printout

The printout in this folder has two strophes of the Poema de Yúçuf in Arabic and Latin. It's a typed transcription, not a facsimile, and I couldn't check it, so treat it as practice. It writes que as كَا, as this system predicts.

Exercises 19

Write in the Morisco system.

1. dixo su fijo
2. la çibdad de Toledo
3. fazer bien
4. su madre e su padre
5. agora quiero dezir
6. caxa and casa: what separates them?