Medieval Linguistics

Damian has stated that those of us who are Spanish medievalists are some sort of linguists and I find this to be correct. While the linguistic transcriptions that are done now days are mostly from the spoken form to the written form the are those of us who still remain focusing on transcribing from old Spanish to modern Spanish. Those of us who have done transcriptions have focused on the transcription style from the University of Wisconsin Medieval Studies. Now, what we medievalists are missing is the actual phonology of the era. Personally I would love to have heard the way they pronounced the words and how they carried out their language but those times are gone and probably that sort of data will never be available. Medievalists always have to juggle words and styles, because all the scribes had their styles, in order to make sense of the literature. Sometimes we even have to transform ourselves into a person from that era. Manuscripts are extremely challenging but they expose every possible clue to the era, including the sociolinguist changes.