Lutsk Karaim

This paper is a critical edition of Jehoszafat Kapłanowski’s (a Trakai-born Karaim-speaking Odessan) two letters written in Hebrew script that were sent in 1868 to Lutsk. The critical apparatus that accompanies the transcription and translation includes commentaries on each linguistic peculiarity or irregularity. The study is augmented by a glossary and facsimile, as well as brief historical comments on some of the persons mentioned in the text.

Conversion to a religion usually has a positive impact on the written culture of a given community. The conversion may or may not result in the adoption of a new writing system. In the Turkic world, we find examples for both cases. The Karaims, by their conversion into Karaitism, adopted the Hebrew script. They used the Hebrew alphabet up till the beginning of the 20 th century in their everyday life for writing; for example, private letters and secular and religious texts in Karaim. Another Turkic speaking group, the heterogeneous Rabbanite community of Krimchaks (whose majority is of Sephardic origin) also used the Hebrew script to write their vernacular. Some characteristics of the writing systems of the Karaim and of the Krimchaks have been described, but no comparative research has thus far been carried out. In this study, the peculiarities of the Hebrew alphabet used by both Turkic speaking peoples will be discussed and illustrated. For instance, the new characters, which were introduced in order to indicate specific Turkic phonetic values, and the ways the same Hebrew vowel sign or letter is used in the different Krimchak and Karaim manuscripts.

The work presents – as far as is now possible – the language spoken by Lutsk Karaims in the second half of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries. This is attempted by means of editing 16 letters written in Lutsk Karaim – with Hebrew interpolations. The manuscripts were written by different authors in Hebrew script.

The present publication appears to be the first critical edition of this type of texts written in this particular dialect. Previous editions of south-western Karaim manuscripts either concerned very short texts from Halych or were prepared with no intention of being professional.

The linguistic description of the manuscripts aims to present a grammar of the manuscripts’ language. It is complemented with a separate chapter dealing with the Slavonic structural influences exerted on the authors’ idiolects, and with the lexicon of the texts. A separate part deals with the orthography and the features of the writing itself. The transcription and translation of each manuscript are preceded with a concise palaeographic description and a summary of the content. The work closes with a glossary, several in¬dexes, maps, and the facsimile of the manuscripts.

This volume offers the first comprehensive study on the history of
Middle Western Karaim dialects. The author provides a systematic
description of sound changes dating from the 17th–19th-centuries and
reconstructs their absolute- and relative chronologies. In addition, the
main morphological peculiarities are presented in juxtaposition to
Modern Western Karaim data.

The textual basis for this historical-linguistic investigation is a critical
edition of pre-1800 Western Karaim interpretations of Hebrew religious
songs called piyyutim (149 texts altogether). The reason behind this
choice is that some of these texts are among the oldest known Western
Karaim texts in general, and that until now no study has brought the
Karaim translation tradition in this genre closer to the reader.

Mehrsprachigkeit ist seit langem ein charakteristisches Phänomen der polnisch-litauischen Karaimen. Die Karaimen verwendeten bekanntlich zusätzlich zum Karaimischen, einer Turksprache, noch verschiedene slavische Sprachen. Den slavischen Elementen im Karaimischen wurde bereits viel Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt, Untersuchungen zu den sprachlichen Besonderheiten der von den Karaimen gesprochenen slavischen Sprachen gibt es jedoch kaum. Die in diesem Artikel vorgestellte Analyse ist ein Beitrag zu diesem Thema. Er umfasst eine Textausgabe sowie eine sprachliche Beschreibung eines aus dem Karaimischen übersetzten polnischen Textes aus dem frühen 19. Jahrhundert, der von einem Kopisten aus Luck in hebräischer Schrift verfasst wurde.

The role of the grammatical cases’ category expressing the relationships between the nouns and other words, especially verbs, within the word groups and sentences is very important in the agglutinative languages. The number and functions of the suffixes of this category, formed of the morphemes called case suffixes in the agglutinative languages, differ according to the language. According to its structure Turkish language belongs to the group of agglutinative languages and thus the case
suffixes take a very important place within its morphology. The relationship of the modern Karaim language and historical Kipchak Turkic has been pointed out by some of the researchers. After performing the comparative analysis of the case suffixes in the works of the field of the historical Kipchak language that has been the source of today’s Karaim language, quite a lot of similarities may observed. These similarities are both seen in respect of morphology and function.
        In this paper, the case suffixes in the works of the field of Kipchak, being the historical heritage of the Karaim language, shall be analyzed using the comparative method. The case suffixes of Codex Cumanicus among the works of historical Kipchak field shall be compared with the modern Karaim language in terms of form and function. Thus the historical relationship between the Kipchak Turkic and modern Karaim language in terms of the case suffixes shall be proved.

Key Words: Karaim language, Kipchak language, case suffixes, comparison

The Karaite prayer house in Lutsk was first mentioned in a letter of Sigismund I dated 22 December ‎‎1506. In the first half of the 17th century the Karaite community made efforts to obtain permission ‎from Sigismund III Vasa to construct stone building in place of the existing wooden one. However, ‎the Karaites were refused. In 1633 Sigismund III’s successor, Ladislaus IV acknowledged their right ‎to possess a wooden prayer house. In the 18th century the building was at least twice devoured by ‎fire. In 1915 this historical edifice was ransacked by Austrian troops. In the paper an attempt to ‎establish the kind of its furnishings is made based on two relations of 1821 and 1908 and an ‎inventory list of 1883. ‎

This article is an attempt to establish the time-frame and relative chronology of the š > s and ö, ü > e, i changes that occurred in south-western Karaim. The sample material used for the present article comes from Halych Karaim handwritten prayer books dating back approximately to the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century, and are written in the Karaim semi-cursive variant of the Hebrew script. The final conclusion of the article is that both changes occurred in the final decades of the 18th century.

In the first part of this study (Karaim Letters of Jehoszafat Kapłanowski. I. A Critical Edition) a critical edition of two Karaim letters is presented. They were sent in 1868 from Odessa to addressees living Lutsk by a citizen born in Trakai. This paper (the second part of the study) contains a detailed linguistic analysis of the letters. Special attention is paid to the dialectal affiliation of the manuscripts’ linguistic material, to interdialectal contacts and to the irregularities recorded.

In this article the author presents a Karaim text from of Josef ha-Mashbir’s (died 1700) autograph. The discovery of this source proves that he was a North-Western Karaim native speaker, which, in turn, supports the claims of those researchers who contend that he originated from Lithuania. Importantly, the source in question is one of the oldest known North-Western Karaim texts.

Józef Sulimowicz (1913–1973), a Polish Karaite, Turkologist and passionate bibliophile, collected a large number of Karaite manuscripts, books and documents in his lifetime. His collection, which includes items originating from both western communities and Crimea, is the only one of its kind in Poland. However, neither an inventory list, nor a catalogue have ever been assembled for the collection. Therefore, its exact content has remained largely unknown. The present paper discusses archival materials of the Karaite community in Lutsk stored in the Sulimowicz collection. It also looks at their origin, status and their research value.

Karaim Settlements in Villages and Farmsteads around Lutsk The Karaim community in Lutsk appears to have been widely dispersed in the 19 th century and beginning of the 20 th , with its members living not only in the town of Lutsk and its surroundings, but also in relatively distant villages and farmsteads. A list of the settlements where Karaims once resided was published in 1933 by Aleksander Mardkowicz. It contains 40 names that the Karaim activist found in old documents. Among those documents there are five 19 th and 20 th century Karaim letters in Hebrew script edited by Németh and a list – still unpublished – of community members living outside Lutsk around 1845. However, those documents include a few toponyms not registered by Mardkowicz. The presence of Karaims in numerous villages and farmsteads is also recorded in public records from 1871-1914. Based on the data from the death register the number of villages with Karaim inhabitants should be increased up to 80. The paper discusses the above-mentioned sources and their use in creating not only an exact map of Karaim settlements around Lutsk, but also in tracing family relations and migrations of the Lutsk Karaim population.

This article describes the emergence of the dialectal differences in phonology that eventu-ally led to the division of Western Karaim into two dialects: North-Western and South-Western Karaim. The study is based on manuscripts and manuscript editions covering the period between the 17th and 20th centuries. Special attention is paid to the relative chronology of the phonological changes. A proposed periodization of Western Karaim is also presented.

In this article the author discusses the correspondence between Sergiusz Rudkowski (1873–1944), a Karaim-born poet and writer, and Professor Tadeusz Kowalski (1889–1948), the founder of modern Polish Oriental Studies. The letters were written in the interwar period (between 1926 and 1939) and pertain mostly to linguistic matters and scholarly plans. Unfortunately, only the letters sent by Rudkowski to Kowalski have survived: currently they are stored in the Archive of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków. Kowalski’s replies were most likely destroyed during the Second World War. The correspondence consists of six letters, two of which were written in South-Western Karaim and four in Polish. Additionally, Rudkowski attached to one of the Polish letters a speech he wrote in Karaim, which he asked Kowalski to translate into Polish. Due to this fact, the text of the speech and Kowalski’s Polish translation also form part of this small collection. In this study the content of all these materials is presented along with a detailed commentary. The importance of these sources written in Karaim lies in the fact that the linguistic material available for studying Lutsk Karaim (a language that is already extinct), such as that used in interpersonal communication, is limited. Special attention is paid to Karaim colloquial constructions, including Slavonic structural influences. Finally, the facsimilia of the letters are also presented to the reader.

In this paper the author presents the hitherto undescribed Western Karaim -a-d- ~ -a-dy- ~ -a-dyr- verbal forms. The description of these forms is based on philological data collected from 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts and the final conclusion is that it was primarily used to express continuative present. The author also argues in favour of treating the first half of the 19th century as the terminus ante quem for its final disappearance in colloquial Karaim. This paper is the second in a series of articles introducing previously undocumented Karaim grammatical categories.

The present article presents an analysis of a Lutsk Karaim literary work, namely Sergiusz Rudkowski’s Dostłar, which was published in two parts in 1931 and 1939. The two charac-ters of the drama use colloquial language and therefore the work appears to be until now the only source of knowledge on Lutsk Karaim in its spoken form. The linguistic peculiari-ties of the drama are compared with other non-literary sources that reflect everyday lan-guage used at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The present study has been carried out in order to determine whether the language of the drama was caricatured by the au-thor, and thus exaggerated to some extent, or whether it reflects the factual command of Karaim during that period. In the final analysis, it is safe to say that the drama’s language should be treated as a reliable source of knowledge. It is important to note that it contains linguistic elements (swearwords, abusive words, Hebrew elements, &c.) that are absent from all other colloquial linguistic materials.

This article presents the results of academic research conducted by a group of scholars in the years 2012–2016 on Karaim manuscripts owned by Polish individuals. The research was financed by the National Science Centre (Poland) (research project nr.: 2011/03/D/HS2/00618). The article provides a concise yet exhaustive description of the privately owned printed and handwritten materials and presents a great deal of hitherto unknown scientific data. The materials stored in private archives open up new perspectives on Karaim studies. They will undoubtedly serve as an important starting point for future research – primarily for historians and linguists, but also for those conducting  literary, cultural, and religious studies.

The oldest known translations of Polish literature into the Karaim language date back to the 17th century. ‎Among those poets whose works have been translated we find Jan Kochanowski and Adam Mickiewicz. ‎Another Polish author that can be read in Karaim is Maria Konopnicka. A translation of her poem Rota ‎‎(The Oath) was recently discovered in the Józef Sulimowicz manuscript collection. The translator was ‎Leon Eszwowicz, who taught religion to Karaite children in Halicz. Although his translation is not of great ‎or significant literary value, it remains an interesting example of the interest shown by Karaites in Polish ‎literature.‎

According to KRPS, kemec ‘1. soldier; 2. Russian (person)’ is native Lutsk Karaim. Since the word lacks any cognates on Turkic ground, in the present paper an attempt is made to link the word to Germ. Kamasche ‘gaiters’ and to explain its phonetic shape as being a consequence of the influence of the language of Polish Jews.

This article is a supplement to Németh (2015), in which the absolute and relative chronology of the 18th and 19th century Karaim sound changes was presented with the aim of reconstructing how Middle Western Karaim evolved into its two well-known Modern Western Karaim dialects. Most of the conclusions formulated in Németh (2015) are further confirmed in the present article, while a few have been slightly modified.

The present article describes the -p edi- past tense in Western Karaim – the first such attempt made in the available scholarly literature. It is important to note that the paper is based not only on philological data collected from manuscripts from the 18th–20th centuries, but also on field research con-ducted by the late Polish Turcologist, Józef Sulimowicz (1913–1973). His linguistic informants were Karaims from Halych.

Key words: historical morphology of Western Karaim, the -p + edi- past tense in Western Karaim, the -p + edi- past tense in Turkic, Western Karaim pluperfect tense