This splendid grammar documents the phonology and morphosyntax of Timucua (ISO 639-3: tjm), an isolate with several dialects which was the Indigenous language of northern and central Florida and part of southern Georgia. Broadwell has worked with other scholars, notably Alejandra Dubcovsky and Jack B. Martin, in the mighty task of describing an extensively documented language whose last speakers perished (as far as we know) some time in the eighteenth century.
The primary impetus for this is not an issue in language revival: no Indigenous group in Florida traces their heritage back to the Timucuas as a whole or to groups such as the Mocamas (speakers of the best-attested Timucua variety) or Potanos (who spoke a somewhat less well-attested variety). Every dormant or extinct language, even if no longer attached to a group of speakers, has myriad stories to relate. In the case of Timucua, our understanding of it begins after the Spanish founding of St Augustine in 1595, but our records of Timucua date from the seventeenth century (mostly Catholic religious works in the Mocama dialect, but also two letters addressed to Spanish authorities; both these letters are from the western reaches of Timucua territory and reflect the speech of the Yustaga or Potano groups). The exception to this is a 60-word vocabulary of a language called Tawasa, collected by Col. John Walker from an Indigenous man named Lamhatty in Virginia in 1707 (Swanton Reference Swanton1929), in which Timucua words are mixed with words of Muskogean (mostly Alabama) origin. This is the last attestation of Timucua to reach us. A reproduction of a Timucua text (not alas identified in the book but actually the opening paragraph of a 1688 Timucua chief’s letter) graces the cover of this grammar.
The historiography of Timucua contains pieces of good and bad luck. Most of our material is bilingual Spanish-Timucua. We also know that the Timucua material was checked by the missionary authors with native Timucua speakers, so that what we have is not some jargonised Timucua translationese bedevilled by Franciscan and Jesuit ignorance of morphosyntactic phenomena which were not also found in Latin or Spanish. Indeed, from the evidence of the two letters written in Timucua by Timucua chiefs, we see that, dialectal differences aside, their language is structurally consistent with what we find in the eight sources produced by Spanish missionaries.
The bad fortune may outweigh the good. Broadwell points out that apart from its unwieldy Latinate framework, Pareja’s Timucua grammar (Pareja 1614) is difficult to use as the context for some examples Pareja provides is opaque. Many lexemes in the Timucua sources are of unknown meaning: any preexisting glossary attached to the grammar (for artes were often accompanied by vocabularios in the colonial Spanish model of language documentation) is no longer extant or has yet to be found. Much of the Timucua textual material is provided with Spanish summaries rather than translations; more positively often they give us insights into the material and abstract culture of the Timucuas. We should also recognise that the data we have on Timucua are several hundred percent more than we have for Tequesta, Calusa or other languages of Florida spoken further south than Timucua.
Broadwell has taken note of the extensive work on the language already available (Granberry Reference Granberry1993 is accessible on the Internet, though Broadwell comprehensively demolishes Granberry’s claim that Timucua was a creole with Warao and Arawakan components). Broadwell’s analysis is his own, drawn from careful exegesis of the materials, and it has benefited much from the use of FLEX language software and its abilities in concordancing and interlinear glossing. This grammar does not answer all the questions about Timucua structure – the sense of several morphs is still a matter of speculation – but it takes us much further than hitherto.
A strong point of this description for people wishing to understand Timucua structure is the use of a detailed system of interlinear glossing, usually in a five-line format, including the contemporary Spanish equivalent (in 17th-century rather than modern spelling). We also find the reference to the occurrence of the sentence or phrase in question in the Timucua materials, including author, date, folio number, and indication of its presence on the recto or verso of that folio. This grammar is so rich that my adumbration of topics is perforce selective.
After a very detailed contents section (v–xiii, unnumbered) and lists of tables, figures and abbreviations, the book is divided into four main parts. The four introductory chapters in Part I (1–33) introduce the language, the sources which survive to document it, a typological sketch of Timucua (superbly done, and an ideal first port of call for readers unfamiliar with the language). These are followed by the two chapters making up Part 2 (37–75), which deals with the phonology and the orthography, which is Spanish based but with some features that are less well-understood (for instance the role of accents on some vowels) and some surprising features, notably the use of <qe, qi> for /ke, ki/, while /ka, ko, ku/ are written <ca, co, cu>. Understanding the phonology of Timucua is built up from an understanding of the orthography, and Broadwell suggests that the language has five vowels /i e a o u/ (Granberry Reference Granberry1993 also expanded the vowel system to five from the /e a o/ which he proposed in 1956), and at least fifteen consonants: /p b f m t tʃ n k kw s h j l r w/. There may also have been others such as /bw/ and /hw/ and maybe /η/, though this last is confined to a single morpheme, spelt <angala> in the sources and use to form teens in the numeral system. Consonant clusters in native Timucua words are confined to /st nt/, and words end in vowels. Further sounds, such as /d/, are introduced in loans from Spanish, and Spanish loan nouns ending in a consonant often receive paragogic /i/ at least in citation form. Several phonological processes, including vowel raising and lowering, vowel harmony and reduplication, are discussed in Chapter 6.
The bulk of the chapters (79–347), presented as Part 3, are seventeen in number. They deal with Timucua morphosyntax and discourse, which are interwoven in Timucua grammar by virtue of the presence and discursive use of evidential and other particles. Timucua is an OV language with postnominal adjectives and with rich affixal (mostly suffixal) morphology on nominals and verbals alike, and prefixes are used to mark first- and second-person pronominals, and also used in the forms ta- ‘away’ and ca- ‘thus’. There is an oblique case marker -qua, which can be glossed as ‘by means of’ in some contexts. But Timucua does not distinguish subject from object morphologically in the noun phrase (this is handled by agreement markers in the verb phrase) and relies on the use of postpositions to disambiguate NPs in sentences where several such occur. Possessive marking on NPs is conducted with suffixes and marks both singular and plural and three persons. Verbal morphology is far more complex than nominal morphology.
The numeral system is essentially quinary, using addition to form higher numerals even in the first decade, and cardinal, ordinal and other orders are well-illustrated (180–187). Demonstratives (both proximal and distal) are pre-nominal, as is the article or discourse marker acu, and the distal category itself employs separate forms to refer to visible or non-visible objects (146).
The well-known North American structural feature of noun incorporation, employing a small number of nominals, is discussed amidst verb morphology: the phenomenon of incorporation seems to be attested for Timucua and is well discussed in the grammar, admitting that the dearth of spaces between words often makes it hard to distinguish (204-212), and there is a handy discussion of compound verbs of emotion involving cume ‘heart’ as the first element (cume mani ‘heart think’ = ‘love’, cume pali ‘heart rub’ = ‘desire’, and the like: 207–209).
The Timucua verb template has seventeen slots in its structure (though only the stem seems to be indispensable), and TAM markers can occur in three different places within this. Broadwell concedes that we do not yet understand all features of the Timucua verb. But we can find a good treatment of valency in the Timucua verb, covering Chapters 16 on valency increase (causatives and applicatives, 248–259) and 17 on valency reduction (reflexives, passives and indefinites: 260–274).
The chapter on Tense-Aspect-Mood (Chapter 19, 284–312) is one of the longest in the book. It shows that of the three discontinuous slots for TAM markers, zero, default and durative markers occupy the first slot, past, irrealis and other future markers occupy the second, and remote and counterfactual markers the third. The slots themselves occur quite late in the verbal complex, well after the verb stem. In fact, in one of the very few errors in this work, there are two non-complementary verbal templates in this grammar; the one on page 200 lacks a third TAM slot, while the one on page 284, which starts with the verb stem (which is the fifth slot on the verbal template on page 200), has what Broadwell calls TAM3 occurring after TAM2, markers of ergativity and negators and thus immediately before the suffixes indicating evidentiality and illocutionary force.
Other topics related less tightly to verb morphology are also dealt with in Part 3, for instance, evidentiality suffixes and illocutionary force and status (313–326), and negation and its scope. Students of morphological rarissima among instances of contact-induced linguistic change will be interested to know that the Timucua negative marker -ti (327–337) has been absorbed into (Muskogean) Mikasuki as a general predicate negator (see Boynton Reference Boynton1982: 149–151 for instances).
Part 4 (Functional systems, 349–426) in its five chapters deals with grammatical relations, with main and dependent clauses, with coordination and various kinds of dependent clauses (including definite and indefinite relative clauses, in which both subjects and objects can serve as antecedents) and with the consequences of the ergative nature of Timucua (and with the pervasive role of switch-reference and the presence of affixes which mark same subject with -ta as opposed to the use of different subjects in neighbouring clauses, marked with -qi). Clause chaining is thereby permissible, as the change of subject, if present, can be tracked. The affix -nima, a temporal adjunct translatable as ‘when’, does not trigger switch reference.
After the main body of the grammar we find (425–448) a series of appendices: endnotes, an extremely useful four-page list of morphemes (complete with cross-references to the chapters and sections of the grammar where discussed), a glossary of linguistic terms, a long list of references, attesting to Broadwell’s comprehensive reading in Southeastern US linguistics and linguistic typology, and an index of subjects and names.
It is a pity that no Timucua glossary is provided in this book, but the online source Hebuano (‘language’) contains a large and growing Timucua dictionary; oddly enough, this excellent resource is not mentioned in the book under review, though it can be found at: https://webonary.org/timucua. Furthermore, although the grammar is text-based, one will have to look further afield for an interlinear analysis of a Timucua text of a reasonable size; a treatment of that old philological warhorse Matthew 6:9-13, the Lord’s Prayer, would have been a good first choice for this book. Broadwell and Dubcovsky (Reference Broadwell and Dubcovsky2023) give the reader a taste of a midsize Timucua text with interlinear glossing, analysis and commentary.
The most recent discovery of a Timucua primary resource was as recently as the 2010s and we may hope that further Timucua materials are to be unearthed. There is more to discover about Timucua structure, but Broadwell’s superb grammar is a heroic effort which provides a methodologically most estimable account, and moreover is unafraid to point out those points in which our information is less certain than we might wish.
