Transliteration and Analysis of Two Passages from the Aleksander Aleksandrowicz Chamail: “Opisanie dni miesięcznych” and “Jakiego dnia znajduje się dusza w człowieku”

Abstract

This paper investigates the language of the so-called Aleksander Aleksandrowicz Chamail, a 19th-century manuscript by Polish-Lithuanian Tatars kept by the Departmental Library of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Warsaw University (without signatory). The manuscript’s main language has been identified as Polish written in Arabic script, although it contains traces of dialect, East Slavic interference and archaisms, as shown by the transliteration of two textual passages into Latin characters as well as by an accurate graphemic and phonemic analysis.

Keywords

• Polish-Lithuanian Tatars
• Byelorussian Tatars
• 19th-century manuscript
• Polish written in Arabic script
• East Slavic interference
• polszczyzna północnokresowa