This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Zaltzman, remove a tissue from language's pocket before putting it in the washing machine.
This episode is about a project to reconstruct the lost language of extinguished peoples and the surprises you can find about the people who had written it down.
Content in the episode, there is mention of slavery, genocide, and the mistreatment of indigenous people of what is now known as the United States of America.
Also, if you have trouble hearing any thing in this episode or any of the other ones, remember there are transcripts of every episode@theillusionist.org.
transcripts.
And if you hear snoring during this episode, it's not me.
It's an interviewees dog.
It is not me.
On with the show.
Tumukwe is somewhat underreported in scholarship of, like, indigenous languages and literacy.
Yeah, I think that's really true.
I think it was virtually undescribed until pretty recently.
So these documents have existed for a long time.
But because there are no longer Temukwa speakers, I think that many of the details of how the language worked were very obscure until pretty recently.
There's still a lot of open questions.
We still don't know what other group of languages it might be related to.
It's what linguists call an isolate, just meaning we don't know.
But an ISIL is sort of like an orphan linguistically.
So we know that it does have some kind of parents or some family it belongs to.
We're just unable to say what that might be at this point based on the evidence that we have, because it's not related to any other language that we know, because there were not any native speakers, because there's not a dictionary from the colonial period.