Please note that, while this site works on any computing device, due to the hover over effect that we have embedded into all documents, users will have the best experience on a computer or a laptop, enabling fullscreen mode.
Currently, our site features twenty-five unique documents, which include postcards, ledgers, letters, lyrics, sketches, notes, and more. Our documents represent Judeo-Spanish within the United States, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Israel, and were written as early as 1899 and as recent as 2016.
This section allows users to decipher the contents of Solitreo documents in Romanization (Latin-character transcription) as well as English translation. For Romanization, simply hover your mouse over any word, and a tooltip will appear with the transcription. Click on said word and the tooltip will now display its literal translation.
Try hovering your cursor over a word below and then clicking on it.
Below each document, you will find the option to download a pdf containing the transcription and translation of the original Solitreo. All Judeo-Spanish transcriptions in Roman characters are based on the National Authority of Ladino’s Aki Yerushalayim conventions of orthography. Please note that, at times, the translation you find when clicking on a given word on an actual Solitreo document and the translation you find on the pdf document may not always coincide. The former should be used only as a quick reference for the most basic meaning of a word, as it does not take into account how it fits into a given sentence; the latter should be used to determine how said word translates, provided its placement and context. Additionally, at the bottom of each page, you will find metadata for each document, as per the Dublin Core schema.
When using hover over and tooltip features:
Brackets may provide missing information, such as when a writer leaves out a letter from a word that readers may otherwise expect to find (e.g. ab[a]shar ‘to lower’)
Parentheses are used when a writer adds an additional letter to a word, which a reader might not typically come across (e.g. aba(k)shar ‘to lower’)
Verbs are often accompanied by an annotation in brackets; this refers to the subject pronoun, regardless if it present or not.
1.SG: yo (JS) – I (EN)
2.SG: tu (JS) – you (EN)
3.SG: el/eya (JS) – he/she/it (EN)
1.PL: mozotros/as (JS) – we (EN)
2.PL: vozotros/as (JS) – you plural (EN)
3.PL eyos/eyas (JS) – they (EN)
( JS=Judeo-Spanish | EN=English )
We welcome you to reach out to us, under the Contact tab, if you have any information regarding these instances.
Explore our documents
MLA Citation: Kirschen, Bryan. “Explore.” Documenting Judeo-Spanish, 2020, www.documentingjudeospanish.com/explore.