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. Become a member of the Allusioverse at theallusionist.org/donate and as well as keeping this independent podcast going, you get regular livestreams and watchalong parties - AND to hang out with your fellow Allusionauts in our delightful Discord community. We're watching the new season of Great British Bake Off together, and a Death Becomes Her watchalong becomes us later in October. The Allusionist's online home is theallusionist.org. Stay in touch via facebook.com/allusionistshow, instagram.com/allusionistshow, youtube.com/allusionistshow and twitter.com/allusionistshow. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you want me to talk lovingly and winningly about your product or thing, sponsor an episode: contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads. This episode is sponsored by: • Ravensburger, the official puzzle supplier of the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships!• Catan, the endlessly reconfigurable social board game. Shop at catanshop.com/allusionist and get 10% off the original base game CATAN by using the promo code ALLUSIONIST at checkout. • Bombas, whose mission is to make the comfiest clothes ever, and match every item sold with an equal item donated. Go to bombas.com/allusionist to get 20% off your first purchase. • Squarespace, your one-stop shop for building and running your online empire. Go to squarespace.com/allusionist for a free 2-week trial, and get 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain with the code allusionist. Support the show: http://patreon.com/allusionist See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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.