There has been some debate recently about a specific kind of question that appears, very occasionally, on the main site: questions asking to identify a word in a text that isn't written clearly and cannot be easily understood.
The two main sides of the debate have been:
- We should not accept them because those questions are not related to the Spanish language, they are about recognizing characters or words (palaeography: the study of ancient and historical handwriting) and that is not dependent of the language.
- We should accept them because the texts are written in Spanish, and knowing the language and the context may help identifying the word, even if we have no knowledge of palaeography.
Fact is, we already have a tag identificación-de-término, that says it is used for "identifying terms [in cases of] bad handwriting or audio". Of course, the existence of the tag does not mean that those questions are on-topic: that's what we want to discuss here. (If it is decided that such questions are off-topic the tag will be removed or warned against its use in such cases.)
Examples of these kind of questions:
- Leer correctamente el registro de un bautismo mexicano de 1744
- Identifying a Spanish name in old Spanish calligraphy from a birth certificate from 1849
So, what's your take on questions about recognizing or identifying words or expressions in handwritten Spanish texts?