Re: VMs: Codex Cumanicus, a special font for it.

[Leonard Fox <rockandhawk@xxxxxxx>]

The Codex Cumanicus was reproduced in a beautiful facsimile edition, bound
in half-parchment, sometime in the mid-1930s by Munksgaard, the Danish
publisher, with an introduction by the great Altaic scholar Kaare Gronbech.
The book is quite rare today, but it would probably be possible to obtain a
copy through interlibrary loan. I have not seen the text on the internet. My
old friend and colleague, Peter Golden, has written several essays on the
work (one or two reproduced online), and indicates that the Turkic language
in the text is quite closely related to Karaim - a language with which I
grew up at home, my family having been Karaites from the Crimea who changed
their difficult to pronounce name when they immigrated to the US in the
1920s. The samples of vocabulary I have seen are, indeed, very reminiscent
of Karaim words.

For those on the list who read Russian, a short (60 pages) work on the Codex
by Aleksandr Garkavets was published this year in Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan):
"Codex Cumanicus: Kypchako-polovetskie teksty XIII-XIV vekov." The ISBN is
5-7667-3619-3. Again, it may be possible to obtain a copy through
interlibrary loan, or else to order a copy through the author. Brief
information on this book, as well as other works by Garkavets, is in English
on http://www.qypchaq.freenet.kz.

A longer study (143 pages) is: "Der Codex Cumanicus: Entstehung und
Bedeutung," by Dagmar Drüll (Stuttgart, 1979).

There is material on the Coman-Polovtsian connection with Karaim and the
Karaites in Simon Szyszman's book "Le Karaisme: ses doctrines et son
histoire," published by L'Age d'Homme in Paris. There is a German
translation available, and my English translation of the book is still in
search of a publisher (if anyone knows of a press interested in issuing a
book on Karaism and the Karaites, please let me know!). I have heard that a
Lithuanian translation was published a couple of years ago, but I have not
seen it (there was an important Karaite community in Troki, Lithuania, the
remnants of which still live in the area).


Leonard 


on 11/06/04 13:26, Knox Mix at knoxmix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> mesinik@xxxxxx wrote:
> 
>> http://www.qypchaq.freenet.kz/Fonts/QDiacPS1.zip
>> well, where is  the Codex himself? ... just keep trying ... if there are a
>> font,
>> there could hide somewhere the Codex, too ... dont ask me, please ...
> 
> Rohonczi Codex might be here:
> 
> http://www.mta.hu/
> 
> Contact and communication needed.
> 
> 
> On the list in the past?:
> Codex Cumanicus, a late 13th-century dictionary of Kipchak, Latin, and
> Persian words. -- Peter B. Golden:
> http://www.ku.edu/carrie/texts/carrie_books/paksoy-2/cam2.html
> and elsewhere. Is this the dictionary Viorica Enachiuc used?
> 
> Knox
> 
> 
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