Michal Németh - Böcker

This volume is based on the papers presented at the conference entitled "Languages and Cultures in Research and Education," held in Krakow from May 19 to 20 in 2009, organized by the Chair of Hungarian Philology of Jagiellonian University on the 20th anniversary of its foundation, as a commemoration of the Year of the Hungarian Language. The conference was dedicated to the celebration of the scientific career of Professor Ralf-Peter Ritter on his 70th birthday. In view of the wide range of his scientific interests and the special occasion on which the conference was held, the conference topics covered subjects connected with researches on historical linguistics lato sensu, as well as research on the Hungarian language and literature. The selection presented therefore contains, above all, articles on Indo-European and Ugro-Finnic linguistics, the history of science, and Hungarian literature. On the occasion of the publication of this volume, the editors would like to thank all the contributors and conference participants, as well as the Jagiellonian University's Faculty of Philology, whose generous help and financial assistance made this publication possible.

The work presents -- as far as is now possible -- the language spoken by Lutsk Karaims in the second half of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries. This is attempted by means of editing eleven private letters and five open letters written in Lutsk Karaim -- with Hebrew interpolations. The letters were written by different authors in Hebrew script.The present publication appears to be the first critical edition of this type of text written in this particular dialect. Previous editions of south-western Karaim manuscripts either concerned very short texts from Halych or were prepared with no intention of being professional.The linguistic description of the texts aims to present a grammar of the manuscripts' language. It is complemented with a separate chapter dealing with the Slavonic structural influences exerted on the authors' idiolects, and with the lexicon of the texts. A separate part deals with the orthography and the features of the writing itself. The transcription and translation of each manuscript are preceded with a concise palaeographic description and a summary of the content.The work closes with a glossary, several indexes, maps, and the facsimile of the manuscripts.