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DOCUMENT RESUME ED 313 901 FL 018 243 AUTHOR Zucker, George V TITLE Suggestions r. the Transcription of SephardicTexts into the Roma) Alphabet. PUB DATE 89 NOTE 11p. PUB T1PE Reports Evaluative/Feasibility (142)-- Viewpoints (120) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Alphabets; Form Classes (Languages);Grammar; *Hebrew; *Romanization; Scholarship;*Spanish; Uncommonly Taught Languages; Written Language IDENTIFIERS Sephardic Jews; *Transcription ABSTRACT Difficulties in transcription from the Hebrewto the Roman alphabet are discussed. The resolutionof some of the problems in Judeo-Spanish texts using the "aljamiado"writing system are reviewed, including the use of some Hebrewconsonants as vowels, representation of Judeo-Spanish sounds non-existentin Hebrew, and phonetic variations not resolved by context.Difficulties encountered in the transcription of aljamiado textsinto the Roman alphabet are then examined. These difficulties includeth, lack of an accepted standardized system for transcription,representation of stress, adjusting the transcription to serve differentpurposes, such as historical study vs. accessibility to layreaders, and the legitimacy of transliteration. Six specific suggestionsfor transcription are made, and 3 transcriptions of thesame text by different people are appended. The transcriptions are done byindividuals whose native languages are Spanish, Judeo-4anish, and English.(MSE) ****%**A**************x************************************************ Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the bestthat can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** IiIIIIMEMEIMMIMMI111.111=MMI "PERMISSION TO REPRODtp.:ETHIS U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTEDBY Moe or Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER IEDIC) Vitus document has been reproducedas received Iroqt the person or oronsahon onginatinit O Minor changes ht.!. been made to improve reproduction Quality. - PoultOlYgraOf oomonsstatedinthiSdocu- 1 TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES merit do not necessarily represent 44=41 INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC.' OERIposMon orpolicy. Suggestions on the Transcriptionof Sephardic Texts into the Roman Alphabet George K. Zucker University ot Northern Iowa While there are many Judea Spanishtexts available for study --both in manuscript and in print,the majority ot themare written in aljamiado; that is,in Judea-Spanish, butusing the Hebrew alphabet. This factor makes themconsiderably less accessible than they mightotherwise be, since manyor the scholars who work with Spanish donot know the Hebrew alphabet. The obvious solution is to transcribe these texts Intotne t.clman alphabet, and, indeed, sometranscription has been aone.-L inose transcriptions often appearas articles in periodicals suchas the American Sephardi, Sefarad andthe Jewish Language Review. but the very process of transcriptionbrings forth anotherseries or problems. The Hebre,.! alphabet consists ofconsonants only; vowels are diacritics--dots and dashes--whichmay appear above or below the letters, or sometimes in the middleof the writing line. Too, Judeo-Spanish contains some soundswhich do not exist in Hebrew-- or, in some cases, in modern Spanish. The aljlamiado writing system, which developed in the MiddleApes in Spain:. solved these problems to some degree, generallyon an ad. hoc basis, but tne 1Moshe Lazar of the University ofSouthern California has recently published a transcriptionot the Ladino Bible of the sixteenth century; Isaac JackLevy at the University ot south Carolina has transcribed Laermoza Rahel;I recently directedan M.A. thesis (presented in May 88at the University ot Northern Iowa by Andrea Liu) called "Dosromansos sefardies: transcriPcibn y traduccibn," which includes twonovelettes of the earlyyears ot this century whichwere published in aljamiadcLinSmyrna--Venganza de muerta (1901) and Am9r desalvajes (1907). 2 solutions were not formalized until later,with the founding c't printing houses in the Ottoman Empire afterthe expulsion the Jews from Spain. Some of the Hebrew consonantswere pressed into service as vowels: the yod was used to representthe front vowels /e/ and /1 /; the vav stood for the back vowels/0/ and /u/. The /a/ is represented by the Hebrew al ph,once a guttural but now silent in Hebrew. Between two other vowels, aleph denotesa hiatus. Final /-a/, most often the sign of femininegender in nouns and adjectives, is represented not by thealeph, but rather by the letter hay (whicn is the zign of femininegender in Hebrew). Words which begin with vowel sounds otherthan /a-/ in Judec'- Spanish are generally written withan initial alepn wnicn, in these cases, has no sound value. While there is no problem inrecognizing /a/ in an alAamiado text, the word discurso could equally wellbe pronounce0 aescurso, descorsq, descorsu, discorso, discorsu if readby someone who knows aliamiado but has never seen or heard thisparticular word before. I suspect that one of the morphologicalcuriosities of Judea -Spanish preterite forms is due preciselyto this kind of sound confusion with the contributing factor ofanalogy. First-person singular preterite formsin Spanish end in -e for first-conjugation verbs, but in -1 forsecond- and tnira- conjugation verbs, and the strong preteritesend in unstressed -e. All of those sounds are represented bya final yod in aljamiado. Consequently, just as we have entenaland vi!...3 in bpanisn, we also find posi_ (from posar, which snould give posp)in Judeo-Spanish. 3. Because of the writing system,we cannot tell if that pronunciation was currentamong Spanish Jews during the ti-fteenth century, or if it developed afterthe expulsion, among subsequent generations who did not have contactwith the spoken languageof Spain. One case in which aljamiado helps withpronunciation is that of the initial h- in Spanish. The change of initial Latinf-. to aspirated, and then unaspirated.h= is a peculiarity of eastilian, so that Latin *fabulare became first/hablar/ and later the modern Spanish /ablar/. That change was in process at theend of the fifteenth century. when the J2W5were expelled. In some areas it had been completed, in othersit had not yet begun. Herhaps this is why the word for 'son' inSalonica is filo while it isijp_in Istanbul. But for texts of the late 'fifteenthand early sixteenth century written in the Roman alphabet,we cannot always be sure that the f- representeda labiodental sound. nor can we relyon an initial h=to be silent.Pljamiado, on the other hand.is an attempt at phonetic representation of the language and, because A. the use of a different alphabet,there is no tie to traditional Latin spellings. If the word was pronounced /ijo/,the initial letter is generallyan alept, but if the h was aspirated, theword begins with the letter hay. I have, in tact, tound afragment of a letter which has both hijo and hermana withinitial hay,, but have not yet been able to dateor place it. The other problem mentioned is thatof representing sounds of Judea -Spanish which do not existin Hebrew; e.g., /j/, /ch/. That is handled in allamiadoby the use of a tick. calleda rate, 4 4 above certain consonants. Gimel, for example, which is normally pronounced as a hard /g/, with the rafe becomes /ch/or Ay/. Bet, generally the bilabial /b/, becomes a labiodental /v/ witha cafe. But the people who wrote the language knew how thewords were pronounced, as did those to whom the various documentswere addressed, so that it was not necessary to takegreat care in the use of the rafe. As is the case with the accent markin modern Spanish, native speakers sometimes leave it outwhere it ought to appear, and other times they put it where it doesn't belong. It won't really make any essential difference to theintelligibility of the document because both the writerand the reader know the words in question, and know how theyare pronounced. Thus. the phonetic representation of Judeo-Spanish is oftenunreliable. We can sometimes, by careful examination ofa document, tell if a bet should have had a rafe or not, when theword occasionally appears with a vav (which, although usually a vowel in al_lamiado, represents the labiodental /v/ in Hebrew). The Valladolid Tagganot 'Laws' of 1432, for example, regularlyuse the vay as the initial sound for the city of Badajo :, so thatwe know that Castilian Jews of the early fifteenth century pronounced it as /v/ rather than /b/. And since we know that there is no word mugos, but rather muchos, we can tell that the medial gkmel snould have been written with a rafe even when it does notapnea in a given manuscript cr printed text. But the Hebrew alphabet adds still another complicationto Judea- Spanish. There are two letters to represent the sound /s/: the pamekh and the pin/shin. The latter may also stand for 5 palatal /sh/, and is theoretically writtenwith a raft, when it has that phonetic value. I say "theoretically" because.in precti.ce, that raft very seldom appears. In those documents which I have examined, the sin is much morecommon than samekh for the is which marks the plural of nouns and adjectives,or the second person singular of verbs. Yet the difference between /s/ and /sh/is the difference in JudeoSpanish betweensecondperson singular and secondperson plural. More often than not, context resolves the problem, but that isn't always true. Now that we've considered some of the prcblems whichcan crop up in reading allamiado texts, weare ready to look at difficulties in the transcription of thosetexts into