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writing of Hebrew represented the only constant knowledge, so conventions applied
to Spanish could be updated at any time. On the other hand, Judeo-Spanish evolved
phonologically, and this was also reflected in the writing system (Pascual Recuero
1988).
The main, but not the only problem, in the editing Judeo-Spanish texts, is the
underspecified use of vowel graphemes. This becomes even more complex if we
consider the fact that the vowel system has suffered some modifications and that
reconstruction on the basis of 15 th century Spanish can not be completely reliable
(especially if we take into account the fact that 15 th century Spanish is known through
the different variations it presented, including in the vowel system).
Two approaches are possible: (1) conserving the original script conventions in
every way, by transliteration of original documents, which means replacing each
grapheme by another one; and, (2) interpreting vowel graphemes, by transcription,
which means specifying the vowels where their presence is indicated. If carried out
in the traditional sense of a philological edition, both have their advantages and
drawbacks. The transliteration conforms to the source, so that the researcher can rely
on its fidelity, but it doesn’t make the text more accessible in terms of intelligibility.
The transcription is certainly more intelligible, but the choices of interpretation of
vowels done on the basis of reconstruction are determined (and fixed forever) by the
transcriber, and fidelity to the source is lost 2 . The need for both translitteration and
transcription as research tools has been recognised in the study of Judeo-Spanish texts;
they are both used in different contexts, and sometimes even the parallel versions
of texts are proposed, as in the edition of Jewish medieval texts from Castilla and
Aragon by Laura Minervini (1992); also, a similar solution is proposed independently
in Stulic (2002) for the editing of a 19 th century Judeo-Spanish newspaper El amigo
del puevlo.
In this paper, we wanted to model a solution for the electronic editing of such texts
that could encompass both approaches, and maybe even offer something more as a
research tool. Although we took as a starting point a very concrete Judeo-Spanish text
from the 19 th century, the problems we are endeavouring to solve could derive from
any text edition where a choice between the intelligibility of the text and the fidelity
to the source is imposed.
2 The text transcribed for syntactic analysis wouldn’t be useful, for example, for research on phonological
issues or writing system history.
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