English

Proper noun

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 The Circum-Baltic Languages: Typology and Contact (edited by Östen Dahl, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm), volume 1 (ISBN 9027230579), page 271:

     For more than six hundred years, Karaim has been spoken as a community language in what is today Lithuania.

Translations

Noun

Karaim ‎(plural Karaims)

1. A member of a Turkic ethnic group which traditionally spoke this language.
   • 1970, Alan W. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea 1772-1783 (ISBN 0521076811), 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 0415082005), 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 1858288401), 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 a Crimean, Turkic 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 […]

Translations

See also

• Karaimism

Hungarian

Noun

karaim

1. possessive first-person singular (multiple possessions) of kar