I. Preliminary remarks

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. The collection, however, contains a document of which we cannot be entirely sure which dialect some of its fragments represent. As it exhibits a number of interesting features, including traces of far-reaching dialect mingling, it undoubtedly deserves a separate presentation.

II. Description of the manuscript

The manuscript is part of Józef Sulimowicz's (1913–1973) collection and can be found under the catalogue number 50II (see the upper-right corner of the sheet).