Kipchak Languages

For a long time Peringer’s short passage (Gen 1:1--3) was the oldest known text written in Western Karaim and it has justly received substantial attention in the scholarly literature. Nevertheless, Peringer’s quotation of Genesis 1–3 has two serious flaws. Firstly, the fate of the manuscript it was taken from is unknown. Secondly, seven words – out of a total of thirty-four – are distorted due to printing errors. There are altogether nine errors in what is a very short text.

Despite the substantial attention that Peringer’s material received, it has never been critically edited or properly discussed and compared with other manuscripts. To fill this gap, we have presented it in extenso – in both its original form and in our transcription – supplemented with a critical apparatus, a translation into English, as well as a philological and linguistic commentary.

(= Slavonic names for mosque with special regard to Polish, Silesian, Czech and Slovak data). -- Abstract: Even though mosques are a typical element of the Islamic culture the channels through which their designations came into Slavonic (as well as some other European languages) are not really well known. This author divides Slavonic reflexes of the Arabo-Turkic word into eight groups and discusses the reasons for their various shapes. The essay is composed of three parts: (1) Background and Western European data; (2) Slavonic and German; (3) Results and questions. The most interesting aspect is that of a semantic difference between two types of words (meczet ~ mešita ~ mošeja and džamija) and its importance for the etymology, as well as some comments on the source of the Czech and Slovak word on the one hand and the Russian term on the other. In the end of part (2) particular attention is paid to the question whether the Silesian name was borrowed from Polish or from Czech.

The present paper provides two case studies of the basic vocabulary of the Turkic languages spoken on the Crimea Peninsula. Its aim is to illuminate the issues that a historical linguist, and in particular a phylogeneticist, faces when analyzing the basic vocabulary of closely related languages in a situation of intensive contact. The first case study is dedicated to the onomasiological reconstruction of the Proto-Karaim Swadesh list. The main problem here is detection of the West Oghuz loans and especially of contact-induced archaization (fake ar-chaisms) in Crimean Karaim. The objective of the second case study is to identify the genea-logical affiliation of the Crimean Tatar dialects. Both the manual analysis of the innovations in the basic vocabulary and the computational lexicostatistics (Bayesian approach, Neighbor-joining, Maximum Parsimony Analysis) confirm the traditional view that the Coastal dialect belongs to the Oghuz subgroup, the Orta dialect-to the West Kipchak subgroup, and the Steppe dialect-to the Nogai Kipchak subgroup. Such affiliations fully fit the documented ethnic history. The correct genealogical affiliation of the dialects in question became possible only after exclusion of all the loans, which has not been done in previous lexicostatistical studies of Crimean Tatar. Both cases show that careful elimination of areal influences is crucial for semantic (onomasiological) reconstruction and phylogenetic studies.

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.

There have been numerous speculations about the origin of Kipchak
Turks, who greatly influenced political entities within prominent states and
territories such as Khwarazmshahs, Mongol Empire, Golden Horde, Mamluk
Sultanate, Georgian kingdoms, Northern Caucasus, Southern Caucasus, Crimea,
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Anatolia, however these speculations failed to
form a consensus about the topic. In this context; the possibility of Kipchak
Turks to be a part of groups formed by Turkic clans has gone unnoticed. 
Kipchak Turks have continued their existence by teeming with the
groups that will be mentioned in the forthcoming chapters. In this study,
insights made by several scientists about the topic Kipchak Turks’ origin as well
as their activities leading up to their involvement in Kimek Confederation will
be addressed.

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.

Our study consists of some phonetic and morphologic characteristics encountered in theinterlinear translation of The Holy Qur'an which is in Manisa Provincial Public Library withregistry number 931. The book was transcribed circa 1500-1600. The scribe is unknown. Adoctorate study was made on the book by Esra Karabacak in 1992. The study was publishedin 1994 in The USA by The Department of The Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations atHarvard University.The language of the book is Old Anatolian Turkish. Notwithstanding that, somemorphological characteristics which are out of Old Anatolian Turkish characteristics areencountered in the book. In addition to these, some conspicuous phonetic characteristics take place in the book. Some of these characteristics are described below.1. Conjugation of positive and negative present tense with personal pronouns.2. Conjugation of the perfect tense with personal pronouns.3. Making the the second person plural conjugation with –
ġ
uñuz/-güñüz suffixes.4. Using –
ġ
an/-gen adjective-verb suffix.5. Using –
ġ
ay/-gey optative suffix.6. Utilizing personal pronouns for first and second persons of declarative conjugation in present tense.7. Encountering –
ġ
anda adverb-verb suffix.8. Alternation of ñ/
ġ
Above considerations which were determined in Manisa transcription shall be compared withsimilar structures in an interlinear translation which is in a private library in Isparta.

Middle-Mongolian has been well documented, therefor we can rely on written sources concerning its structure and vocabulary. It was the language of the fast rising Mongolian Empire, exerting major influence on many languages spoken on the steppe area and in its vicinity. It can be felt even in the languages spoken in the Caucasus or in the Volga region.

Bu çalışmada, kökeni tartışmalı Çuvaş Türkçesi пӗҫӗ pĕśĕ “uyluk; kalça, bacak” sözcüğü için iki yeni etimoloji önerisinde bulunulmuştur. Bunlardan biri, Ermenice poçʻik “kuyrukçuk”, diğeri Orta Türkçe biçäk “baldır” sözcüğüne dayanmaktadır. Tartışma sonunda, Ermenice sözcüğün köken olarak daha muhtemel olduğu ve yüzyıllar boyu Kafkasya’da yerleşik bulunan Oğur-Bulgar boyları aracılığıyla Çuvaş Türkçesine ulaştığı sonucuna varılmıştır.

In this article two manuscripts are compared: the oldest known Western Karaim and the oldest known Eastern Karaim translation of Biblical texts — both found by the present author. These texts are juxtaposed with the Eupatorian printed edition of the Tanakh from 1841 the language of which is a subject of discussion.

In Turkish:
Çalışmamızda, birisi Batı Karaycası öbürü Doğu (Kırım) Karaycası olmak üzere iki tane Tanah çevirisi karşılaştırmaktadır. Her ikisi de bilinen en eski Tanah çevirileridir. Ayrıca, 17. ve 18. yüzyıllarda istinsah edilen bu nüshalar 1841'de Gözlevede basılan Tanah çevirisiyle karşılaştırılmaktadır.

Abstract: Hunting with birds is an ancient practice among the Turkic peoples, which is reflected in the rich vocabulary associated with hunting birds and falconer’s gear. The specialized vocabulary is best preserved and documented in the Kipchak Turkic languages, Kyrgyz and Kazak, reflecting the fact that falconry traditions were best preserved by these two language communities. The names of the birds of prey are more widely documented and also occur in smaller, less completely investigated, Kipchak languages. This paper will provide a brief overview of the falconry terminology of the Kipchak Turkic languages, focusing on the most widely used names of the birds used for hunting. The Kipchak languages are one of the Turkic groups that have long been in contact with Russian and other languages of Eastern Europe, such as Ukrainian and Hungarian, and have thus served as an important transmitter of Turkic lexicon into these languages.

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.

Karaim Turkic, which is classified geographically amongst the Northwestern group of Turkic dialects and within the Kipchak group in terms of its ethnic structure, is one of the present-day Turkic dialects with dramatically declining number of speakers. Having three dialects of Trakai, Halitz-Lutsk and Crimea, Karaim Turkic has preserved some archaic words and suffixes of the general Turkic language.
In the written and spoken language of Karaim Turkic basic suffixes of verbal adjectives and verbal adverbs of the Old Turkic language, present in many Turkic dialects today, continue to exist while verbal suffixes that emerged through formation of fixed forms by combination of more than one suffix are still in use. One of the suffixes that emerged through formation of a fixed form in combination of more than one suffix in Karaim Turkic is the suffix - Adoğon / -ydoğon. The suffix -Adoğon / -ydoğon is observed to be used in formation of both verbal adjectives and verbal adverbs. Use of the same suffix in the formation of both verbal adjective and verbal adverbs simultaneously is not commonly observed in Turkic. The structure and use of the suffix -Adoğon/-ydoğon in Karaim Turkic is therefore an interesting case.
In this paper information on the structure and formation of the suffix -Adoğon / -ydoğon shall be provided by revealing the use and functions of the suffix based on examples taken from texts in the Trakai dialect of Karaim Turkic. Comparison with similar suffixes in other historical and modern Turkic dialects shall be made while establishing the structure and functions of the suffix.
Keywords: Karaim Turkic, verbal adverb, verbal adjective, Turkic dialects

The present article is a continuation of a description of manuscript III-73, which
contains the earliest known Western Karaim Torah translation (from 1720) along
with the North-Western Karaim translation of four books of Ketuvim – more precisely,
the translation of the Book of Ruth, the Book of Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes and the Book
of Esther. The linguistic peculiarities of the Torah were presented in Németh (2014b).
This paper, in turn, contains a linguistic description of the Haphtarah – in particular
a critical edition of the Book of Ruth and its comparison (in the critical apparatus)
with the Book of Ruth as printed in the Eupatorian Tanach in 1841. Importantly,
the two parts of manuscript III-73, i.e. the Torah and the Haphtarah, as tentatively
notified in Németh (2014b), are very much different from a linguistic point of view,
and for this reason they are presented separately. Finally, observations that stem from
a comparison between the manuscript fragment edited here and the Eupatorian
print will be presented in the third part of this series of articles, since they primarily
concern the Eupatorian print rather than manuscript III-73.

This paper attempts to work out some principles of the establishment of those Old Kipchak words which are distinctive from other Old Turkic languages. Old Kipchak is a language that was spoken in two periods, one Early Old Kipchak from the late-8th century when it first appeared to the mid-11th century, the other Late Old Kipchak from the second half of the 11th century to the Mongol invasion in the 1230s.

In this article an early Bible translation into north-western Karaim is described. The man-uscript, written in Hebrew script (in its Karaim semi-cursive variant), dates back to 1720 what makes it the oldest western Karaim Bible translation to be hitherto critically analysed. The manuscript was copied in Kukizów by Simcha ben Chananiel (died in the 1720s). The language of the manuscript reveals archaic features, among others the consonant harmony being in the process of emerging.

As a significant branch of Old Kipchak language, Armeno-Kipchak appeared in XVIIth c. in an area which Polish, Ukrainian and Armenian were spoken (the west part of present-day Ukraine and the east part of present-day Poland) and it was written by Armenian script which leads it to be called "Armenian". On this language, which is uncertain whether it belongs to Armenians who adopted Kipchak language or Kipchaks who converted to the Gregorian sect of Christianity, occured some syntactical and morphological phenomena seeming unnatural to internal process of Turkic language due to the area which it originates through close contacts and translated works. The pattern -GAn+lAn- [past participle + denominal verb derivative]/-mA+GAn+lAn- which has been surveyed in the paper appears as an example of rare inclination in early works of Turkic even though it is compatible with agglutination system of Turkic. In the light of similar forms documented in early texts of Turkic, it will be examined why this is an orignal form, why it is less preferable and to what extent contact languages are influencing on this inclination.

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.

Old Uyghur körši and its equivalents in Turkic and Mongolian languages . // . Vocabulary of Old Turkic easy to access through Clauson’s dictionary and Drevnetyurkskiy slovar’. But After 1970ies, there so many new and wide text editions on Old Uyghur. I have dealed with KÖRŠi “neighbour” which was not attested in Clauson dictionary and DTS.  //  Eski Uygurcanın sözvarlığı 1970 yılına kadar yapılan çalışmalara göre çok iyi ortaya konmuştu. Ancak 1970’ten sonra, özellikle Japonya ve Almanya’da bu sahada çok yeni ve kapsamlı metin yayımları yapıldı. Dolayısıyla Sir Gerard Clauson’un “Eski Türkçe Sözlük”’ü ile “Drevnetyurkskiy slovar’”ın’da karşımıza çıkmayan cok sayıda yeni kelime ile karşılaştık. Bunlardan birisi de ‘komşu; karşısında, hemen yanında’ anlamında olan körşi sözüdür. Bu söz bugün Kalmuk, Halha ve Buryat Moğolcasında yaşadığı gibi Moğol Yazı Dilinde de görülür. Günümüz Türk dillerinde ise Kıpçak grubu Türk dillerinde, Kazakça, Baraba Tatarcası, Tatarca, Başkurtça ve Çuvaşçada (Tatarcadan ödünçleme) görülür. Özellikle Kazakçada şekil, kelimenin Moğolcadan geri ödünçleme olduğunu gösterir. Makalede, Eski Türkçe üzerine hazırlanan sözlük çalışmalarında yer verilmeyen 14 veriye yer verilmiştir.

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.

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 is an attempt to establish the time-frame and relative chronology of the evolu-tion of consonant harmony in north-western Karaim. The sample material used for the present article comes from a Karaim handwritten Bible translation dating back to 1720 (the oldest analysed Western Karaim Bible translation), copied in Kukizów by Simcha ben Chananiel and written in the Karaim semi-cursive variant of the Hebrew script. Addition-ally, in the present article an attempt is made to describe step by step how the harmony shift operated.

The present article is an addition to a description of manuscript III-73, which contains
the earliest known Western Karaim Torah translation ( from 1720) along with the
North-Western Karaim translation of four books of Ketuvim (as a Haphtarah) – more
precisely, the translation of the Book of Ruth, the Book of Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes
and the Book of Esther. The linguistic peculiarities of the Torah were presented in
Németh (2014b). The linguistic peculiarities of the Haphtarah, based on an edition
of the Book of Ruth, were presented in Németh (2015). This paper, in turn, contains
remarks that stem from a comparison of manuscript III-73 to the Eupatorian print –
written in Crimean (Eastern) Karaim with some elements of Crimean Turkish – and
serves to contribute to discussion concerning the stemma codicum of the latter.

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 subject of the present paper is palatalization in Mishar Tatar, the Western Tatar dialect. The phenomenon to be discussed is present in all Mishar sub-dialects, even in the Sterlitamak and Baykibash sub-dialects, which are spoken further East, in the domain of Bashkir and the central dialect of Tatar. Consonant palatalization is not a typical phenomenon for Turkic languages. In the area where the Mishar dialect was and is spoken, it is the characteristic of the Mordvinian languages Erzya and Moksha and of Chuvash, a Turkic language diverging from the surrounding Kypchak languages. Due to geographical proximity and the ensuing language contact, these languages and the Tatar dialects constitute a linguistic convergence area.
Aside from Mishar Tatar and Chuvash, consonant palatalization takes place also in other Turkic languages, Gagauz, Trakai Karaim and Crimean Tatar; but especially in Mishar Tatar this phenomenon has obtained a specific development. A partial description of the palatalization phenomenon as a result of ‘monophthongization’ can be found in Maxmutova’s publication (1978: 52ff.), which was espoused by other scholars in subsequent works.
This paper tackles the issues of the features of this palatalization, the phonetic processes and circumstances leading to it and its consequences in the Mishar dialect, taking into consideration the following matters:
- the phonetic environment of palatalization and the consonant classes involved;
- the function of palatalization;
- its impact on morphology and word structure.
In order to find out possible reasons for this phenomenon in the Mishar dialect, we will compare palatalization mechanisms and their functions in other Turkic languages, both within this contact area and outside it.
The research is based on text sources of Mishar sub-dialects as well as on audio recordings. The target group consisted of such native speakers who experienced little or no influence of Standard Tatar through education, mass media or professional occupation.

In the present paper I aimed to identify and separate the Kipchak (Northwestern Turkic) elements in
the 13th – 14th-century Khwarezmian Turkic literary language, primarily drawing on the linguistic material
of Gulistān bi’l-Turkī and Nahǰu’l-Farādīs. By comparing the grammars of several Khwarezmian
Turkic writings and analysing the complete vocabulary of the above two works, the relationship
between Khwarezmian Turkic and the Kipchak languages becomes more transparent than hitherto
thought of. The results may contribute to better understanding the heterogeneous views concerning
Khwarezmian Turkic that appeared during the last one hundred years.

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