Timucua

George Aaron Broadwell

Turlington 1208A

Timucua is the Native language which was spoken in the region around Gainesville when the Europeans arrived. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish missionaries introduced literacy to the Timucua. Timucua people wrote letters to each other, and Native people worked with missionaries to translate seven books into Timucua. These books are the oldest texts in a Native language of the United States, and there are hundreds of pages of material available for study.

In this practicum, we will learn to analyze texts in Native languages written by non-linguists. In particular, we will focus on

* How to build corpora of historical texts

* How to handle spelling variation

* Techniques for searching corpora

* Building dictionaries based on text corpora

* Interpreting grammatical descriptions written by non-linguists.

Though the Timucua language is no longer spoken, we can learn much from studying materials written in this language. In this class, we will honor the memory of the Timucua people and the language that was originally spoken in Gainesville.