Scholars are divided as to whether or not those who transcribe medieval texts should expand abbreviation marks. As soon as a transcriber expands an abbreviation, he or she is making an assumption about what the scribe is using the abbreviation mark to represent. For this reason, some historical linguists are of the opinion that expanding even the most seemingly uncomplicated abbreviation is a step too far, preferring transcriptions which present the unexpanded abbreviation marks in all their glory. However, here at the Estoria de Espanna Digital project we are intending to create an edition for use by different audiences, some of whom will be unfamiliar with medieval abbreviations, and who will require abbreviations to be expanded for them to fully access the text. This is the beauty of an online edition such as the one we are creating. It is for this reason that we have been making use of a system of xml tagging which will allow the eventual user of the edition to choose between the diplomatic version of the text, with all the abbreviations included in the transcription as close as possible to how they appear in the manuscript, and the edited version of the text, with the abbreviations expanded.
The expansion of abbreviation marks is not as simple as it may seem at first. In many cases it may appear ‘obvious’ to us as modern readers what the abbreviation mark represents, for example in a third person plural preterite verb we may see a macron above the final ‘o’, which we assume represents a missing ‘n’, given that modern Castilian third person plural preterites end in -on, for example acabaron, estuvieron, comieron, fueron.
In these cases expanding abbreviations is relatively unproblematic, and a simple <am>”abbreviation mark”</am><ex>”expansion”</ex> tag does the trick. Although, as modern transcribers, we must recognise that even in these ‘uncomplicated’ cases we are making assumptions and editorial decisions, changing the original text.
Other times, expanding abbreviations is not so simple. The manuscripts we are transcribing come from a time when Castilian spelling rules were developing and evolving. This, coupled with the fact that manuscripts such as E are composites, meaning they are made up of folios from different eras, which may have spelled certain words differently, complicates matters. For example, the word which nowadays is spelled ‘mujer’ – woman, appears in manuscripts with more than one spelling: sometimes it is mugier, sometimes muger, and sometimes abbreviated to muḡr.
In this case, the tag itself is simple, and we can again use our old faithful <am>”abbreviation mark”</am><ex>”expansion”</ex>, but the difficulty is working out what exactly should appear as the expansion. Should it be e or ie? The jury’s out.
Sometimes we find examples of abbreviations where the missing letters appear before the abbreviation mark, so our simple <am>”abbreviation mark”</am><ex>”expansion”</ex> doesn’t cut the mustard, as this only works where the abbreviation appears directly before the expansion. On these occasions we use the more complicated ‘choice’ tag. For example trr̄a, which, following discussion and linguistic research by the team, we have decided to expand to ‘tierra’ (not terra).
The abbreviation mark here, the macron, appears over the letter ‘r’, so after the missing letters ie. This is an occasion where we would use the longer abbreviation expansion tag of
<choice><abbr>trr<am>̄</am>a</abbr><expan>t<ex>ie</ex>rra</expan></choice>, and the word would appear in the diplomatic version as ‘trr̄a’ and in the edited version as ‘tierra’.
But what happens when the abbreviation mark is nowhere near the missing letters? This example below shows the word which often appears unabbreviated as ‘duennas’.
The macron here is clearly over the ‘u’, a couple of letters prior to the missing letter ‘n’. What should we do about such an abbreviation? Do we consider it a scribal error, which according to the transcription norms we are using, we should definitely not correct? Has the scribe done what we as modern writers do on a regular basis when we ‘cross the t’s and dot the i’s’ in handwritten documents, but in our haste miss those letters entirely, and draw a floating line or dot on our page, above a letter where it doesn’t belong? Could be, but I find it hard to imagine one of the Alfonso X’s scribes rushing to the extent that this happened. And if it did, and he noticed his error, he could easily have corrected it by scraping, as we have seen the scribes do time and time again in this witness. Furthermore, this is not an isolated incident, and the scribe uses the same abbreviation again and again, suggesting he is putting the abbreviation mark exactly where he wants it, and it just doesn’t fit the rules we are used to seeing scribes adhere to. Perhaps it is not a scribal error at all. The issue is muddied further upon the realisation that these ‘rogue’ abbreviation marks appear several times in the folios following 200r, which scholars have come to recognise as fourteenth-century folios slotted into those dating to the late thirteenth century, to fill in a gap in the text. Is the fourteenth-century scribe aiming to emulate the scribal practice of his thirteenth-century counterparts but missing the point (or should that be ‘macron’?) ? I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but questions remain about how to represent such abbreviation marks in the transcription, and how and even if we should be expanding them at all. Answers on a postcard please.