The aim and scope of the present work

The purpose of the present study is, above all, to present a critical edition of 16 unknown Lutsk Karaim manuscripts written in Hebrew script. Special regard is paid to the colloquial constructions and to the Slavonic structural impact. The linguistic description of the manuscripts thus contains information about the usage of the particular morphosyntactic categories divided into two parts. The first gives an overview of the indigenous elements of morphology and syntax, while the second one deals with all the Slavonic-influenced grammatical categories. This is preceded by a review of the disputable matters connected to the phonetic description of the Karaim dialect in question, but only in summary way, since this constitutes the subject of our separate article (Németh 2011). In view of this one must remember that this linguistic analysis should not be considered as a complete grammar of Lutsk Karaim, but merely as agrammatical description of the edited manuscripts.

A separate subchapter is devoted to the attested lexicon. The manuscripts contain a number of lexical elements not noted yet for south-western Karaim. This concerns not only Slavonic elements, the number of which was, as the edition shows, considerable in the every-day language, but also the native vocabulary, as well as the oldest layer of Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian loanwords. From among the latter, special attention is due to the Hebrew elements, since the importance of these was unjustly underrated in the largest Karaim dictionary (KRPS), probably as an aftermath of the language purism movement, which became stronger in the interwar period and was modelled on a similar movement in Turkey (Dubiński 1982: 143).

We consider this part of our research especially important, in the light of the fact that the number of any kind of south-western Karaim texts available to us is very small. Based on the bibliography delivered in KRPS (14–29), we can say that the number of publications in this dialect approximates to only 130. But the real value of this number becomes meaningful when we realise that most of them, approximately 100 titles, are short, consisting of articles or poems, some two to three pages long, published in the journal Karaj Awazy. The remaining works are mostly books or booklets, no longer than 40 pages, and published in the vast majority of cases, thanks to the activity of Aleksander Mardkowicz.