North-Western and Eastern Karaim features in a manuscript found in Łuck

Kraków: Studies on the Turkic World, 2010. A Festschrift for professor St. Stachowski on the occasion of his 80th birthday edited by E. Mańczak-Wohlfeld and B. Podolak, pp. 75–94.

As reported in Mardkowicz (1933b), a considerable part of the Karaim manuscripts stored in the loft of the kenesa in Łuck until the First World War were destroyed during the war and the Russian Revolution in 1917. Luckily for us, some of those manuscripts, mostly private letters and circulars, after having been stored and partly edited in 1933 by Aleksander Mardkowicz, ended up in a private collection and have survived in almost perfect condition to this day. The majority of the surviving manuscripts is written in Hebrew semicursive script – most of them in the Łuck subdialect of Łuck-Halicz Karaim (hereinafter called, for the sake of brevity, the Łuck Karaim dialect), a smaller part of the collection being written in Troki Karaim. Even though some of the manuscripts display glosses from other dialects, the reader normally has no particular difficulty classifying the manuscript from the linguistic point of view. They are going to be presented in the near future in another, more extensive study.