183. Timucua

The Allusionist

Helen Zaltzman

Arts, Education, Words, Linguistics, History, Entertainment, Helen Zaltzman, Etymology, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Spanish missionaries arrived in what is now called Florida, there were 100,000-200,000 Timucua people in the region. Just two centuries later, there were fewer than 100. Soon, with all the people who spoke it dead, the Timucua language died out, too, preserved only in a few Spanish-Timucua religious texts.

In the 21st century, linguistic anthropologist Aaron Broadwell and historian Alejandra Dubcovsky have been decoding and translating these texts to understand the Timucua language and the people who were writing it down.

Find out more about this episode and the topics therein, and obtain the transcript, at theallusionist.org/timucua. Content note: in the episode there is mention of slavery, genocide, and mistreatment of the indigenous people of what is now called United States of America.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Illusionist, in which I, Helen Zoltzman, remove a tissue from language's
0:08.6	pocket before putting it in the washing machine.
0:11.4	This episode is about a project to reconstruct the lost language of extinguished peoples
0:17.0	and the surprises you can find about the people who had written it down.
0:21.2	Content note, in the episode that is mentioned of slavery, genocide and the mistreatment
0:26.0	of indigenous people of what is now known as the United States of America.
0:30.6	Also, if you have trouble hearing anything in this episode, or in any of the other ones,
0:34.3	remember there are transcripts of every episode at theillusionist.org slash transcripts.
0:41.2	And if you hear snoring during this episode, it's not me, it's an interviewee's dog.
0:46.2	It is not me.
0:48.0	On with the show.
0:56.1	Tumikwa is somewhat under-reported in scholarship of indigenous languages and literacy.
1:03.4	Yeah, I think that's really true.
1:05.0	I think it was virtually undescribed until pretty recently.
1:12.4	So these documents have existed for a long time, but because there are no longer
1:17.8	Tamukwa speakers, I think that many of the details of how the language worked were
1:23.8	very obscure until pretty recently.
1:28.1	There's still a lot of open questions.
1:29.5	We still don't know what other group of languages it might be related to.
1:34.4	It's what language is called an isolate, just meaning we don't know.
1:37.7	But an isolate is sort of like an orphan linguistically.
1:42.0	So we know that it does have some kind of parents or some family it belongs to.
	...

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