Pora, para and ՔA: methodological problems in the study of abbreviations in medieval spanish

Abstract

The triple presentation system (facsimile, paleographic transcription and critical presentation) applied to the creation of language corpora has contributed to improving the materials for the study of the history of Spanish. However, even with all these resources available, aspects such as the interpretation of abbreviations in medieval manuscripts are still a challenge for researchers. This article makes a critical review of the issue using as a case study the problem of interpreting the abbreviation used to represent the prepositions pora and para in medieval Spanish. To this end, a detailed overview of the different factors that must be considered when interpreting this abbreviation is offered. Likewise, different possibilities of quantification of pa are applied to the documents of the CODEA corpus (Corpus of Spanish Documents Prior to 1800), with a contrastive analysis of the differing evolutions that result from such interpretations.