Stories and Lessons

There are many ways to begin thinking about the Timucua language. We can think about sentence structure, verbs, word order, adjectives, nouns… but we thought it would be best to begin with a story.

This is a long story; it is also a weird story…  and like most of the Timucua language stories in printed materials it is a translation of a European story. “The woman who ate dirt” is a story about a nun from a noble family who presumably had pica.  The original story is included in the writing of the Venerable Bede (673-735 AD) and probably concerns some noblewoman from the Roman empire. It is not about Native people or actors.

But through this source we will discuss the methods, approaches, and challenges we face when learning this marvelous language. Below are the first few lines of the story in Timucua. First comes the Timucua, then comes our new literal translation made through a close analysis of each word and all its components. This approach is called interlinear glossing and will be discussed in detail later. But rather than get bogged down with technicalities, let’s read what Timucuas wrote close to 400 years ago.

[194r] Venerable Beda istanimano, mine na equelamicarema nubotayanqua, ano yayi, hachitalaca, acu nia chocorileta hibabila, §caqi nubotamano, osococo Dios inosisiromanta, §aquitasiqelenoma, yaleta mosohaueleta, monja habito laputa monja conuento echala. Hitimano, iniheti inino iquoba, vnaoquonamerano, naminososiro [194v] manta, §cumehiotequa, chaquosohetimota cumehionino piri care naminosala, §qisaco iqeco, ayeasileco, cupaco vlipalaco, eyoisti cocobacare quenema hebila

The Venerable Bede said that in his days, there lived a noble person, a powerful woman, who was an important person. This noble person wanted to serve God more and and in order to take care of her virginity, she requested the nun’s habit and entered a convent. The devil wanted to cause her to come to great sin with the lusts of the body being unable to overcome (her) to tempt (her), he brought small temptations. She ate dirt, mud, tree leaves, pine bark, broken pottery and other very bad things.

How do we translate Timucua?

The story of “The Woman Who Ate Dirt” comes from a 1635 religious Spanish text. Here is what the original text looks like:

The first step was to transcribe the Timucua text. Though this text is printed, we still face several difficulties in reading it. Take the third word: iſtanimano. The letter that looks like an “f” is actually a long s (like on the US Constitution), so we transcribe it istanimano. The same thing happens with the word oſococo (osococo) and naminoſoſiro (naminososiro) The letter “v” often stands in for “u,” as in the word that looks like vnaoquona but we have transcribed as unaoquona. Printed hundreds of years ago, these Timucua texts followed the typographical standards of the time. When transcribing the texts, we have sought to make the spelling intelligible for today’s readers.

Since the Spanish and Timucua texts do not perfectly match word for word, the second step was to read the Timucua, carefully look at each word, and begin breaking down possible meanings and interpretations. Here is what this analysis looked like:

Each word was separated into morphemes (units of a language that cannot be further divided); each of those components was identified and translated, but kept in its original place in the sentence, so the reader can begin to see how Timucua sentences are ordered and organized.

The third step was to create a literal translation.

But really? How do we begin reading Timucua?

Let’s start with one sentence.

Sentence:

Qisaco iqeco ayesileco cupaco vlipalaco eyoisiticocobacare quenema hebila

Broken into morphemes:

qisa-co iqe-co aye-asile-co cupa-co ulipasa-co eyo-isticoba-care quene-ma he-bi-la

Now the definitions of each part:

dirt -conj mud-conj tree-leaf-conj pine:bark-conj broken:potttery-conj other-very:bad-plural and-def eat-past-dec

Literal Translation:

She ate dirt, mud, tree leaves, pine bark, broken pottery and other very bad things.

Multiverse of Analysis

Let’s go down the rabbit hole. This simple sentence is filled with fascinating linguistic nuggets to nibble on. This sentence allows us think about so many different parts of the Timucua language. For example:

• Sentence order in Timucua… did you notice the verb was all the way at the end? Most Timucua sentences are in “S-O-V order,” meaning subject, object, and then verb. But in this case, as in many, there is no clear subject. It is implied in the verb.
• Verbs: the verb is in the 3rd person… “someone” is eating all these bad things. But that is implicit. There is no “she” explicit in the Timucua version. We know “she” refers to the woman tempted by the devil because of context. Figuring out the subject of sentences in Timucua can often be tricky.
• Tense: the verb he (eat) is followed by the suffix -bi, indicating a past event. “-bi” is just one of the ways Timucuas marked tense.
• Declaratives: the suffix “-la” is very common and functions like a period, noting the end of a sentence or idea. When “-la” is missing, it means that the sentence is not yet over, or that it is becoming a question or possibly a command. Be on the lookout for “-la” at the end of words to note the end of sentence or idea.
• Conjunctions: In this sentence you find the suffix “-co”. It is a conjunction that repeats in the sentence to link alternative things together. In this case, it links all the “bad things” the woman ate.
• And speaking of bad things… This sentences introduces us to how the Timucua languages makes plurals. The suffix “-care” signals that the women did not eat one bad thing, but many bad things, plural.

Click on any of these these topics, to begin learning the language further.