Orthography and punctuation

Introductory remarks

The several works hitherto published about western Karaim printed and handwritten materials present merely short descriptions of the characteristic features of the writing. More precisely, there are three such articles – written by Grzegorzewski (1903), Munkácsi (1909), and, about Trakai Karaim materials, Zajączkowski, A. (1934) – and a one-page-long part (if the tables attached and a sample of text presented are not counted) devoted to this topic in Mireev/Abragamovič (2008: 15–19). The latter work is somewhat disappointing, since the description we find there is rather disorderly, and the description of the use of the Hebrew script by south-western Karaims presented there is far from being complete (especially Table 1, pages 18–19).

Quite complex is also Munkácsi's description, but, although it is five and a half pages long, it is, in fact, much briefer, since it is richly exemplified by southern Karaim linguistic data. Additionally, since the description is based only on three hymns translated from Hebrew, we must admit that it is far from being an exhaustive study on the topic.

To a certain degree, it stands to reason that the above-mentioned scholars dealt with this matter only superficially; they described non-colloquial or printed language materials mostly, which display a much more consistent spelling than manuscripts. The same excuse cannot be made, however, with regard to the one-page-long chapter devoted to Hebrew writing in Musaev (1964: 34–36), which is a good example of how such studies should not be carried out. The reader of a Karaim grammar does not need the information that (Musaev 1964: 34), simply because it is an fact. Information telling us which vowel signs are, or were, used in Karaim would be much more appreciated. Additionally, the elaboration lacks any representative examples for the data presented in the table discussing the spelling to sound correspondences (on page 35). For instance, it would be very useful to the reader to know how often Karaims used the letter taw for [t] and ayin for [h] in native words, as it seems to be a rather rare phenomenon. Furthermore, it would be very interesting to know why double waw and double yodh are missing from the table, as these notations were very common among Karaims (and were used to note [v], and, respectively).