Sobre los refranes de El Quijote

Abstract

A great number of different works were inspired by the immortal masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes, writers and poets, artists and philosophers, musicians and linguists have contributed to the popularisation of the novel. In this article I highlight several points of interest concerning the inexhaustible proverb heritage collected in The Quixote; particularly its actuality, its importance and its representative character for the modern Spanish language - all these features are of great importance to the Spanish language teaching. Among more than two hundred popular proverbs cited in The Quixote, around 50 entries were included in my study about the survival of the Spanish proverb and almost all of them belong to so called “Spanish paremiological minimum”, in other words, to the stock of proverbs which an average young native speaker in Spain necessarily knows. The proverbs used several centuries ago in the Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes are of great importance as proverb heritage to the contemporary Spanish language.