A Historical Morphology of Western Karaim: The Two Pluperfect Tenses in Diachronic and Areal Perspective

This article is a continuation of the analysis of the Karaim -p edi- past tense presented, for the first time in scholarly literature, in Németh (2015). In the latter paper, this verbal category was described on the basis of a few South-Western Karaim examples, only, and was termed plusquamperfectum ii. In this paper the description of its semantic scope has been refined based on an analysis of recently discovered North- and South-Western Karaim examples as well as on a further evaluation of Turkic (including Eastern Karaim) data. Importantly, it is argued that the practice of (also) expressing habitual events by means of this verbal category (which is quite an unusual feature in the Turkic linguistic world) is a consequence of contact-linguistic factors, namely the influence of the Polish language, in which Western Karaims were (and still are) proficient. Finally, to obtain a complete picture of its evolution the -p edi- pluperfect is placed in the broader context of the Karaim past tense system. Following Németh (2015) and Németh (2019), this paper is the third in a series of articles introducing previously undocumented grammatical categories of Western Karaim.