Timucua language
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Timucua_language".

Timucua
Pronunciation:	/ti'mu:kwa/
Spoken in:	United States
Region:	Florida, Southeastern Georgia, Eastern Alabama
Language extinction:	Became extinct around the second half of the 18th century. See History of the Timucua.
Language family:	Suggested to belong to the Chibchan, Arawakan, or Paezan families, among others  Timucua
Writing system:	No native writing system; language recorded in Latin alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	n/a
ISO 639-2:	n/a
ISO 639-3:	tjm
Pre-contact distribution of the Timucua language. The Tawasa dialect was geographically isolated in Alabama.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Timucua is a language isolate formerly spoken in northern and central Florida, southern Georgia, and eastern Alabama by the Timucua people. Timucua was the primary language used in the area at the time of Spanish arrival, and linguistic and archaeological studies suggest that it may have been spoken from around 2,000 BC. There were eleven Timucua dialects but the differences were slight and they mostly served to delineate tribal boundaries. There exist today only nine primary sources of information about the Timucua language, 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 and served the Timucua for thirty-one years. He 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.

Linguistic relations

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]

Joseph Greenberg, in his much-debated proposal of the overarching Native American language super-family of Amerind, has suggested that Timucua belongs to the Paezan family, along with several other languages from Colombia, Ecuador, and other regions of South America. In his Amerind Dictionary, he cites 93 Timucua words -- however, while he uses only Granberry's 1993 book "A Grammar and Dictionary of the Timucua Language," there are several discrepancies between the two works.

Some problems are minor differences in form or spelling, such as using kuyo/cuyo for kuyu, 'fish.' Other Timucua words are given incorrect definitions. The word ukwa/uqua means 'to undertake, to teach, to learn; pupil,' not 'to eat.' Iki/iqi means 'rise, hood, revive,' not 'to make.' Ano does not mean 'young of animals,' but rather the very semantically different ideas of 'male human being, person, man, parents, lord, or master.' Other problems arise when the "related" Timucua words have definitions that are very far-removed from the suggested proto-word's meaning. Greenberg suggests that proto *pita is somehow related to the Timucua ipita, 'to take off, undress,' and that *pala 'river' is related to the Timucua word iparu meaning not just 'drink,' but also 'to eat (something that requires chewing' and 'to crush, grind, or break (with the teeth).' Finally, some forms simply do not exist in the Greenberg dictionary, and so their origin is puzzling. The word etea 'to take, to grasp' is nowhere to be found, and similarly ukwata/uquata 'body, flesh' is missing, although several very different words with this definition are easily found. Perhaps the strangest is the appearance in Greenberg's text of a Timucua word okut, 'drink,' but with the word-final /t/ it does not phonetically resemble any other word in the language.

Dialects

Father Pareja named nine dialects spoken in northeast Florida and southeast Georgia: ^[5]

1. Timucua proper - north of the Santa Fe River in what are now Columbia, Suwannee and Madison counties in Florida.
2. Potano - in what is now Alachua County and the northern part of Marion County in Florida (the territory of the Potano tribe).
3. Itafi (or Icafui) - in southeast Georgia.
4. Yufera - in southeast Georgia.
5. Mocama (Timucua for 'salt water') or Agua Salada (Spanish for 'salt water') - along the Atlantic coast from St. Augustine north to the Altamaha River in Georgia.
6. Tucururu - uncertain, possibly in south-central Florida (a village called Tucuro was "forty leagues from St. Augustine").
7. Agua Fresca (Spanish for 'fresh water') - along the lower St. Johns River, north of Lake George.
8. Acuera - on the upper reaches of the Oklawaha River and around Lake Weir.
9. Oconi - "three days travel" from Cumberland Island, possibly around the Okefenokee Swamp.

The isolated dialect of Tawasa was spoken in Alabama. Most of the linguistic documentation is from Mocama and Potano.

Phonology

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).

Consonants

Timucua had 14 consonants:

• /k/ is represented with a c when followed by an /a/, /o/, or /u/; otherwise, it is represented by a q
• There is no true voiced stop; [d] only occurs as an allophone of /t/ after /n/
• /g/ existed in Timucua only in Spanish loanwords like "gato"
• Sounds in question, like /f/ and /b/, indicate possible alternative phonemic values arising from the original Spanish orthography
• The only consonant clusters were intersyllabic /nt/ and /st/
• Geminate consonant clusters did not occur

Vowels

Timucua had 5 vowels, which could be long or short:

• Vowel clusters were limited to intersyllabic /iu/, /ia/, /ua/, /ai/
• Timucua had no true diphthongs

Syllable structure

Syllables in Timucua were of the form CV, V, and occasionally VC (which never occurred in word-final position).

Stress

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:

• yobo [yóbò] 'stone'
• nipita [nípìtà] 'mouth'
• atimucu [átìmûkù] 'frost'
• holatamaquí [hôlàtâmàkʷí] 'and the chief'

Phonological processes

There are two phonological processes in Timucua: automatic alteration and reduplication.

Alteration

There are two types of alteration, both of which only involve vowels: assimilation and substitution.

• Assimilations occur across morpheme boundaries when the first morpheme ends in a vowel and the second morpheme begins with a vowel. Examples: tera 'good' + acola 'very' > teracola 'very good'; coloma 'here' + uqua 'not' > colomaqua 'not here.'

• Sustitutions also occur across morpheme boundaries. Regressive substitutions involve only the "low" vowels (/e/, /a/, and /o/) in the first-morpheme position, and can occur even if there is a consonant present between the vowels. The last vowel of the first morpheme is then either raised or backed. Other regressive substitutions involve the combination of suffixes, and their effects on the vowels vary from pair to pair. Non-regressive substitutions, on the other hand, affect the second vowel of the morpheme pair. Examples: ite 'father' + -ye 'your' > itaye 'your father' (regressive); ibine 'water' + -ma 'the' + -la 'proximate time' > ibinemola 'it is the water' (regressive, suffix combination); ucu 'drink' + -no 'action designator' > ucunu 'to drink' (non-regressive).

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

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.'

Morphology

Timucua was a synthetic language.

Bases

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.

Affixes

Timucua had three types of bound affix morphemes: prefixes, suffixes, and enclitics.

Prefixes

Timucua only had five prefixes: ni- and ho-, '1st person,' ho- 'pronoun,' chi- '2nd person,' and na- 'instrumental noun'

Suffixes

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

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.

Pronouns

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.

Nouns

There are nine morphemic slots within the "noun matrix":

• 1 - Base
• 2 - Possessive Pronoun
• 3 - Pronoun Plural
• 4A - Base Plural
• 4B - Combining Form
• 5 - 'The'
• 6 - Particles
• 7 - Enclitics
• 8 - Reflexive

Only slot 1 and 4A must be filled in order for the lexeme to be a noun.

Verbs

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.

• 1 - Subject pronoun
• 2 - Object pronoun
• 3- Base (verb)
• 4 - Transitive-Causative
• 5 - Reflexive/Reciprocal
• 6 - Action designation
• 7 - Subject pronoun plural
• 8 - Aspect (Durative, Bounded, Potential)
• 9 - Status (Perfective, Conditional)
• 10 - Emphasis (Habitual, Punctual-Intensive)
• 11 - Locus (Proximate, Distant)
• 12 - Mode (Indicative, Optative, Subjunctive, Imperative)
• 13 - Subject pronouns (optional and rare - found only in questions)

Particles

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:

• amiro 'much, many'
• becha 'tomorrow'
• ocho 'behind'
• na 'this'
• michu 'that'
• tulu 'immediately'
• quana 'for, with'
• pu, u, ya 'no'

Syntax

According to Granberry, "Without fuller data ... it is of course difficult to provide a thorough statement on Timucua syntax." ^[6]

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

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

Clauses in Timucua are: subjects, complements (direct or indirect object), predicates, and clause modifiers.

Sentences

Timucua sentences typically contained a single independent clause, although they occasionally occurred with subordinate clauses acting as modifiers.

Sample vocabulary

Sample text

Here is a sample from a priest's interview of Timucua speakers preparing for conversion: ^[9]

Hachipileco, cacaleheco, chulusi eyolehecote, nahebuasota, caquenchabequestela, mota una yaruru catemate, caquenihabe, quintela manta bohobicho?

Do you believe that when the blue jay or another bird sings and the body is trembling, that is a signal that people are coming or something important is about to happen?

See also

• Timucua

Notes

References

• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• Crawford, James. (1975). Southeastern Indian languages. In J. Crawford (Ed.), Studies in southeastern Indian languages (pp. 1-120). Athens, GA: University of Georgia.
• Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-048774-9.
• Granberry, Julian. (1990). A grammatical sketch of Timucua. International Journal of American Linguistics, 56, 60-101.
• Granberry, Julian. (1993). A Grammar and Dictionary of the Timucua Language (3rd ed.). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. (1st edition 1984).
• Milanch, Jerald T. (2004). Timucua. In R. D. Fogelson (Ed.), Southeast (p. 219-228). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 17) (W. C. Sturtevant, Gen. Ed.). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-072300-0.
• Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
• Mooney, James. (1910). Timucua. Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin (No. 30.2, p. 752).
• Pareja, Fray Francisco. (1614). Arte y pronunciación en lengua timvquana y castellana. Mexico: Emprenta de Ioan Ruyz.
• Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978-present). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 1-20). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. (Vols. 1-3, 16, 18-20 not yet published).
• Swanton, John R. (1946). The Indians of the southeastern United States. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology bulletin (No. 137). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
• Granberry, Julian. (1956). Timucua I: Prosodics and Phonemics of the Mocama Dialect. International Journal of American Linguistics, 22, 97-105.

External links

• Ethnologue: Timucua
• Linguists research Timucua, a language with no speakers
• Timucua Language Resources