Karaim

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.

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

• Karaism, Qaraism
• Karaitism, Qaraitism

• Ethnologue entry for Karaim, tpi ⁠

• Kamari, Makira