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[LAK LANGUAGE] Kazikumytakaya azbuka [i.e. Kazikumik ABC]

Item #2646

Tiflis: General Steep of Caucasian Army military typography, 1865. 60 p. 21,5 × 15,5 cm. Original printed ornamental wrappers. Pale stain on the front cover. Uncut, the book was never in use. Near fine condition.

Extremely rare edition of the alphabet book and general grammar of Lak language. The language was called Kazikumik by the association with Kazikumukh Khanate that existed in Dagestan in late XIXth century. It was centered around mountain village Kumukh in the North Caucasus. Liquidated in 1859, the territory of the khanate became part of the Dagestan region as the Kazikumukh district. In 1859 the conquest of Chechnya and Dagestan was completed in the Caucasian War and for this purpose the book was printed as an early attempt to categorize the Lak language and bring the Cyrillic script to the area.
In the 1860s, after the annexation of Dagestan to the Russian Empire, the ethnographer and linguist P. K. Uslar compiled the first Lak grammar. This grammar used a modified Cyrillic alphabet with the addition of several Latin and Georgian letters. In 1865, the book “Kazikumyk alphabet” was published in Tiflis in this alphabet, and then in 1865—1867, 2 more books - “Water, air and their modifications” and “Arithmetic”. Since 1866, the Uslar alphabet began to be taught in the first secular Lak schools (Kumukh and others), but this alphabet was not widely used and gradually fell into disuse.
Pyotr Uslar (1816—1875) was Russian military engineer (major general), linguist and ethnographer. One of the largest Caucasian scholars of the 19th century, the author of grammatical descriptions of the Abkhaz, Chechen, Avar, Lak, Dargin, Lezgin and Tabasaran languages. Member of the Caucasian department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (1851), corresponding member in the category of linguistics of the Historical and Philological Department of the Academy of Sciences (1868). His name is not stated on the book, but it was this alphabet he has introduced that was taught in Dagestan schools until 1923.

Extremely rare. The only copy according to the Worldcart is in British Library.

Price: $3,250.00