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2.2 Specific Problems in the Judeo-Spanish Context
The most salient specificity of Judeo-Spanish texts is the writing system in which
they were composed, and it represents, at the same time, the most important difficulty
in their editing and computer processing.
The Judeo-Spanish documents produced in the post-expulsion period were
commonly written in an adaptation of Hebrew script (in this context its distinctive
Rashi version is frequently used, but the square Hebrew script is equally found; the
difference between the two is only in the form of the letters). The practice of using
Hebrew script for texts in Romance languages was already very common before the
expulsion (see Minervini 1992).
In the history of writing systems, the adaptation of a script originally designed for
one language into the writing system of another language is a cultural phenomenon
that has been frequently repeated; it leads to the development of new conventions
adapted for the target language that involve the use of graphemes coming from the
source language’s writing system.
In its original form, the Hebrew script made no use of vocalic graphemes, because
in most of the cases, the realised linguistic contrast was of grammatical and not
lexical character. In order to avoid certain ambiguities, some letters progressively
acquired vocalic meaning in certain contexts in Biblical Hebrew (yod, waw, he and
aleph). The fully vocalised writing system of Hebrew was designed much later, and
has been mostly reserved to the texts of the Bible (for more details see Sampson
1997:123-129).
Similar to the Hebrew writing tradition, in Spanish texts, the fully vocalised script
was reserved only to translations of the Bible and sacred texts, but in other texts
the usage of letters with vocalic meaning was extended to all contexts, with the
particularity that two letters, yod and waw, could denote two vowels each, /e/
and /i/, and /o/ and /u/ respectively. Also, a diacritic sign (of different shape in
different times and traditions) has been introduced above certain letters to create
new graphemes for consonants that had no counterpart in Hebrew writing system, or
that lacked phonological value in Hebrew (Sampson 1997:123-129).
Nevertheless, the history of this adaptation shows many variations in application
of conventions. One of the sources of variation comes from the possibility to use
different letters for the same phoneme (this kind of variation is found even within the
same text). Although some of the basic principles of adaption of Hebrew script for the
Spanish language have probably been trasmitted over generations, the reading and
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