A Halich Karaim translation of Hebrew biblical texts

The volume by Zsuzsanna Olach is a corpus-based analysis of a translation of Hebrew biblical texts into Halich Karaim, a Kipchak Turkic variety previously spoken in the present-day Ukraine. The corpus comprises sixty selected pages of a 596 page manuscript written in the Hebrew alphabet. A detailed transliteration system renders the information encoded in the Hebrew script. Furthermore, on the basis of the transliteration, a Simplified Interpretative Transliteration (SIT) system is applied to make the Karaim text more easily readable. The main focus of this study is the analysis of the linguistic characteristics copied from Biblical Hebrew onto Halich Karaim. The theoretical framework applied is the Code-Copying Model (Johanson 2002). As one of the aims of the book is to characterize the type of Bible translation that the studied Halich Karaim texts represent, a typological framework proposed by Floor (2007) is employed. The introductory section gives a brief presentation of the Halich Karaims and previous studies on their language and Bible translations. The main part of the study provides a systematic description of Biblical Hebrew properties copied onto the language of the Halich Karaim Bible (copied features of nominals and verbs, copied syntactic and lexical characteristics). The in-depth analysis of the language of the translation leads to the conclusion that it represents a ‘close resemblant translation type’ in Floor’s typology. This is further supported by a comparison with other Karaim (Trakai and Crimean) and Turkish Bible translations. The Appendix contains the first Halich Karaim Bible texts published in transliteration.