Wiktionary

Karaim

See also: karaim

English edit

Proper noun edit

Karaim

  1. A Kipchak Turkic language, with Aramaic and Persian influences, spoken in Lithuania, Poland, the Crimea and the Ukraine.
    • 1981, Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union, page 2:
      At times the discrepancy can be even greater: only 12.8% of the Karaim, a Turkic-speaking group living for the most part in Lithuania, declared Karaim as their native language.
    • 2001, Éva Ágnes Csató, “Syntactic code-copying in Karaim”, in Östen Dahl, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, editors, The Circum-Baltic Languages: Typology and Contact, volume 1, →ISBN, page 271:
      For more than six hundred years, Karaim has been spoken as a community language in what is today Lithuania.

Translations edit

Noun edit

Karaim (plural Karaims or Karaim)

  1. A member of an ethnic group in Central and Eastern Europe which traditionally spoke this (Turkic) language and practiced Karaite Judaism.
    • 1970, Alan W. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea 1772-1783 →ISBN, page 120:
      He began to develop closer relations with his Karaim subjects and issued a charter to a Karaim named Iosif to try again to establish a mint. The Karaim Rabbi wrote that after the Christians had left, […]
    • 1998, Lars Johanson, The Turkic Languages, →ISBN, page 8:
      The term Karaim refers to both a people and to a religious system. Karaims are believers in the Old Testament but consider themselves to be of Turkic ethnic origin. They have traditionally used the Hebrew alphabet for writing their language, […]
  2. (rare) collective plural of Karaim.
    • 1981, Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union, pages 2, 47, and 49:
      At times the discrepancy can be even greater: only 12.8% of the Karaim, a Turkic-speaking group living for the most part in Lithuania, declared Karaim as their native language.
      […]
      […] the Karaim, who are by religion (though not ethnically) Jews, a unique survival of the adoption of Judaism as the official religion of the Khazar empire […]
      […]
      The Karaim are being rapidly assimilated, ethnically and especially linguistically, to the surrounding Russian population.
    • 2004, Jonathan Bousfield, Baltic States, →ISBN, page 102:
      The Karaim
      A Turkic-speaking group practising a branch of Judaism, the Karaim are thought to be descended from the Khazars, a central Asian people who held sway over a steppe empire stretching between the Black and Caspian seas […]
  3. (rare) A Karaite (especially an Eastern or Central European, Turkic-speaking one).
    • 1882 January 9, Wickham Hoffman, in a letter to Mr. Frelinghuysen, published in the Index to the Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the Forty-Seventh Congress, 1882-'83, page 44:
      He added that he was not "one of those Talmud Jews"; that he belonged to the American Reformed Church, known in Russia as the Karaim Jews. […] As soon as General Kosloff understood that Moses was a Karaim Jew, he told the consul-general to send the man to him the next morning […]

Translations edit

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Further reading edit

Anagrams edit

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