The Hebrew Bible has long been translated into the Karaim language. Such translations are important for Karaim rituals and help to preserve the Karaim language, which has recently become endangered. Although the language of these translations shows some common features, the translations of different Karaim varieties show some differences, as well. Therefore, the present study analyses part of a translation of the Tanakh into Karaim that was published in Crimea in 1841. The language of the so-called Gozleve Bible is Crimean Karaim, an extinct Eastern variety of Karaim that belongs to the Kipchak (North-Western) group of the Turkic languages. As such, typical Kipchak features are expected to have been preserved in written Crimean Karaim sources. However, the language of this translation also shows Oghuzic characteristics. Thus, this study will demonstrate some specific linguistic characteristics of the Oghuz branch of Turkic as well as their distribution throughout the Book of Leviticus in the Gozleve Bible. Specifically, it will focus on the phonetical, morphological, and lexical features.

This is a short overview of a Tatar journal Heberçı of 22 (+2 title) pages published in 1952 in Stockholm, the content, and the language features of which were unknown to the specialists up to now. It was called issue number 1. The publication was realized by a group of well-known Tatar writers, scientists and journalists who lived at that time in Sweden as immigrants. The copy of the journal which was at my disposal was received from Stockholm. The study of this bulletin may give new information about the duration of the keeping or not keeping of the immigrants’ mother tongue in a foreign language environment. Also, one can regard it as a source for research of the social status of the immigrants in Europe in the middle of the 20th century. This article will present the following: 1. an overview of the content of the bulletin, 2. an analysis of the language of the journal in comparison with the Modern literary Tatar language, 3. the translation into English of 2 texts from the bulletin and 4. 5 pages of facsimiles of the texts.

This paper describes a unique memoir written by a soldier about his experiences during the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905. The memoir is written in the Krimchak ethnolect of Crimean Tatar using Hebrew letters. This memoir changes our notion about the Krimchaks as a group of quiet, religious people, indifferent to their surroundings. The memoir’s author, Menahem Berman, appears as a person who takes an active part in different historical events of his stormy life, both in peacetime in Odessa before the war and after he was called up and during his journey through Siberia to fight in the war. He describes life in field conditions during the war in Manchuria and his life after the war in captivity in Japan. He is an observant man, taking notice of all that is around him and recording all the details and his impression of them. In this paper the content of the memoir will be discussed, and the quality of the manuscript is described. In a linguistical overview, the Krimchak ethnolect used in the memoir is shown to have an Oghuz grammatical form prevailing over the Kypchak form, and hence the ethnolect can be regarded as a patois of the basic southern dialect of Crimean Tatar. This paper also presents 100 initial sentences of the text in transcription and with translation and glossary.