A historical morphology of Western Karaim: The -a jez- ~ -a ez- approximative

Abstract

Karaim is often treated as an exceptional Kipchak Turkic tongue in which certain, otherwise widespread Turkic verbal constructions are not present. Philological discoveries of recent years show, however, that some of these categories did exist in Karaim. As a response to this issue, the present article documents the Western Karaim equivalent of the Tkc. -a jaz- approximative construction. It is based on 18th- and 19th-century Biblical texts which are then juxtaposed with both phonetically and morphologically atypical 20th-century data. This contribution is part of a series of works describing Karaim grammatical categories hitherto undocumented in the scholarly literature.