| Timucua | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation | [tiˈmuːkwa] | |||
| Spoken in | United States | |||
| Region | Florida, Southeastern Georgia, Eastern Alabama | |||
| Extinct | second half 18th century | |||
| Language family | ||||
| Dialects |
Tawasa ?
|
|||
| Writing system | recorded in the Spanish alphabet | |||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-3 | tjm | |||
|
Pre-contact distribution of the Timucua language.
The Tawasa dialect, if it was Timucua, would have been geographically isolated in Alabama |
||||
|
||||
Timucua is a language isolate formerly spoken in northern and central Florida and southern Georgia by the Timucua people. Timucua was the primary language used in the area at the time of Spanish arrival in Florida. Linguistic and archaeological studies suggest that it may have been spoken from around 2000 BC. There were nine or ten Timucua dialects, but the differences were slight, and they served mostly to delineate tribal boundaries. There is further suggestion that the Tawasa of what is now northern Alabama may have spoken Timucua, but this is disputed.
Only nine primary sources of information about the Timucua language survive, including a Spanish-translated Timucuan letter to the Spanish Crown in 1688, and two catechisms written in Timucua and Spanish by Father Gregorio de Movilla in 1635. Most of what is known of the language, however, comes from the works of Father Francisco Pareja, a Franciscan missionary who came to St. Augustine in 1595. He served the Timucua for thirty-one years, and wrote several Spanish-Timucua catechisms, as well as a grammar of the Timucua language.
In 1763, the very few remaining Timucua speakers were relocated to Cuba, near Havana. The group is now extinct.
Contents |
Timucua is anomalous in that it is not genetically related to any of the languages spoken in North America, nor does it even show evidence of large amounts of lexical borrowings from them. Relations have been proposed with Muskogean, Algonquian, Cariban, Siouan, Arawakan, and Chibchan languages. None of these proposals have been convincingly demonstrated. In recent years the linguist Julian Granberry has suggested that the Timucuan language may be related to Warao, a language isolate of South America.[1] His claim is still under debate by scholars,[2] and historical linguist Lyle Campbell calls it "in no way convincing".[3] Granberry also suggests that Timucua may rather be a “creolized system” of several Native American languages, including many of those listed above, and that the Timucua may have arrived from islands in the Caribbean located off the coast of Colombia.[4]
Father Pareja named nine or ten dialects each spoken by one or more tribes in northeast Florida and southeast Georgia:
All of the linguistic documentation is from Mocama and Potano.
Scholars are not in total agreement as to the number of dialects. A number of scholars, including Jerald T. Milanich and Edgar H. Sturtevant, have taken Pareja's Agua Salada as an alternate name for the well-attested Mocama dialect ("mocama" is Timucua for "ocean"). As such, Mocama is often referred to as Agua Salada in the literature. This suggestion would put the number of dialects attested by Pareja at nine. However, others, such as Julian Granberry, argue that the two names referred to separate dialects, with Agua Salada being spoken in an unknown area of coastal Florida.[6]
Additionally, John R. Swanton identified the language spoken by the Tawasa of Alabama as a dialect of Timucua. This identification was based on a 60-word vocabulary list collected from an informant named Lamhatty who appeared in Virginia in 1708. Although Lamhatty did not speak any language known in the area, he was said to have related that he had been kidnapped by Tuscaroras nine months earlier from a town called Towasa. Lamhatty was certainly a Timucuan speaker, but John Hann calls the evidence of his origin as a Tawasa "tenuous".[7]
A true phonemic notation of Timucua was never undertaken; the sounds of the language can only be conjectured based upon the sources available, most notably Pareja's work. The charts below give the reconstituted phonemic units in IPA (in brackets) and their general orthography (in bold).
Timucua had 14 consonants:
| Biabial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Palato- alveolar |
Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | labial | ||||||
| Stop | p [p] | t [t] | c, q [k] | qu [kʷ] | |||
| Affricate | ch [tʃ] | ||||||
| Fricative | b [β] (b?) | f [f](φ?) | s [s] | h [h] | |||
| Nasal | m [m] | n [n] | |||||
| Rhotic | r [r] | ||||||
| Approximant | l [l] | y [j] | |||||
Timucua had 5 vowels, which could be long or short:
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| High | i [i] | u [u] |
| Mid | e [e] | o [o] |
| Low | a [a] | |
Syllables in Timucua were of the form CV, V, and occasionally VC (which never occurred in word-final position).
Words of one, two, or three syllables have primary stress on the first syllable. In words of more than three syllables, the first syllable receives a primary stress while every syllable after receives a secondary stress, unless there was an enclitic present, which normally took the primary stress.
Examples:
There are two phonological processes in Timucua: automatic alteration and reduplication.
There are two types of alteration, both of which only involve vowels: assimilation and substitution.
These can in turn be either regressive or non-regressive. In regressive alterations, the first vowel of the second morpheme changes the last vowel of the first morpheme. Regressive assimilations are only conditioned by phonological factors while substitutions take into account semantic information.
Non-regressive alterations are all substitutions, and involve both phonological and semantic factors.
Reduplication repeats entire morphemes or lexemes to indicate the intensity of an action or to place emphasis on the word.
Example: noro 'devotion' + mo 'do' + -ta 'durative' > noronoromota 'do it with great devotion.'
Timucua was a synthetic language.
These morphemes contained both semantic and semiological information (non-base morphemes only contained semiological information). They could occur as either free bases, which did not need affixes, and bound bases, which only occurred with affixes. However, free bases could be designated different parts of speech (verbs, nouns, etc.) based on the affixes attached, and sometimes can be used indifferently as any one with no change.
Timucua had three types of bound affix morphemes: prefixes, suffixes, and enclitics.
Timucua only had five prefixes: ni- and ho-, '1st person,' ho- 'pronoun,' chi- '2nd person,' and na- 'instrumental noun'
Timucua used suffixes far more often, and it is the primary affix used for derivation, part-of-speech designation, and inflection. Most Timucua suffixes were attached to verbs.
Enclitics were also used often in Timucua. Unlike suffixes and prefixes, they were not required to fill a specific slot, and enclitics usually bore the primary stress of a word.
Only the 1st and 2nd person singular are independent pronouns—all other pronominal information is given in particles or nouns. There is no gender distinction or grammatical case. The word oqe, for example, can be 'she, her, to her, he, him, to him, it, to it,' etc. without the aid of context.
There are nine morphemic slots within the "noun matrix":
Only slot 1 and 4A must be filled in order for the lexeme to be a noun.
Timucua verbs contain many subtleties not present in English or even in other indigenous languages of the United States. Interestingly, there is no temporal aspect to Timucua verbs – there is no past tense, no future tense, etc. Verbs have 13 morphemic slots, but it is rare to find a verb with all 13 filled, although those with 8 or 9 are frequently used.
Particles are the small number of free bases that occur with either no affixes or only with the pluralizer -ca. They function as nominals, adverbials, prepositions, and demonstratives. They are frequently added onto one another, onto enclitics, and onto other bases. A few examples are the following:
According to Granberry, "Without fuller data ... it is of course difficult to provide a thorough statement on Timucua syntax." [4]
Timucua was an SOV language; that is, the phrasal word order was subject–object–verb, unlike the English order of subject–verb–object. There are six parts of speech: verbs, nouns, pronouns, modifiers (there is no difference between adjectives and adverbs in Timucua), demonstratives, and conjunctions. As these are not usually specifically marked, a word's part of speech is generally determined by its relationship with and location within the phrase.
Phrases typically consist of two lexemes, with one acting as the "head-word," defining the function, and the other performing a syntactic operation. The most frequently-occurring lexeme, or in some cases just the lexeme that occurs first, is the "head-word." All phrases are either verb phrases (e.g. Noun + Finite Verb, Pronoun + Non-Finite Verb, etc.) or noun phrases (e.g. Noun + Modifier, Determiner + Noun, etc.). If the non-head lexeme occurs after the "head-word," then it modifies the "head-word." If it occurs before, different operations occur depending on the lexeme's part of speech and whether it is located in a verb or noun phrase. For example, a particle occurring before the "head-word" in a noun phrase becomes a demonstrative, and a non-finite verb in a verb phrase becomes a modifier.
Clauses in Timucua are: subjects, complements (direct or indirect object), predicates, and clause modifiers.
Timucua sentences typically contained a single independent clause, although they occasionally occurred with subordinate clauses acting as modifiers.
| English | Timucua |
|---|---|
| one | yaha |
| two | yucha |
| three | hapu |
| man | biro |
| woman | nia |
| dog | efa |
| sun | ela |
| moon | acu |
| water | ibi |
| door | unuchua |
| fire | taca |
| tobacco | hinino |
| bread | pesolo |
| drink | ucu |
Here is a sample from a priest's interview of Timucua speakers preparing for conversion:[10]