Dr. George Aaron Broadwell
Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology
The Puzzle of the Timucua Language: Spanish and Native Voices in Colonial Florida
The Timucua were the largest group of indigenous people in Florida at the time of Spanish contact. The Franciscans began missionization work with the Timucua in 1590, and set up schools to teach Timucua people to read and write their language. In the period between 1612 and 1635, several bilingual or monolingual books were published in the Timucua language.
These provide use with ample material on the language, but we also face substantial challenges in understanding the grammatical structure of the language as well as the content of the texts. There is no dictionary from the colonial period, so understanding these texts requires careful comparison between Timucua and Spanish source materials.
This talk will discuss the structure of a project for the grammatical analysis of Timucua, for both its linguistic interest and for better integration of the linguistic evidence with the archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence about the Timucua people.
Friday, October 16, 2015
Turlington Hall, 1208, 3pm