Timucua language
Differences among the nine or ten Timucua dialects were slight, and appeared to serve mostly to delineate band or tribal boundaries.Including his seven surviving works, only ten primary sources of information about the Timucua language survive, including two catechisms written in Timucua and Spanish by Gregorio de Movilla in 1635, and a Spanish-translated Timucuan letter to the Spanish Crown dated 1688.Most Spanish colonists and mission Indians, including the few remaining Timucua speakers, left for Cuba, near Havana.Timucua is an isolate, not demonstrably related genetically to any of the languages spoken in North America, nor does it show evidence of large amounts of lexical borrowings from them.Others, including Julian Granberry, argue that the two names referred to separate dialects, with Agua Salada being spoken in an unknown area of coastal Florida.[2] Additionally, John R. Swanton identified the language spoken by the Tawasa of Alabama as a dialect of Timucua.Lamhatty has been identified as a Timucua speaker, but John Hann calls the evidence of his origin as a Tawasa "tenuous".The charts below give the reconstituted phonemic units in IPA (in brackets) and their general orthography (in plain text).Unlike suffixes and prefixes, they were not required to fill a specific slot, and enclitics usually bore the primary stress of a word.There are six parts of speech: verbs, nouns, pronouns, modifiers (there is no difference between adjectives and adverbs in Timucua), demonstratives, and conjunctions.Phrases typically consist of two lexemes, with one acting as the "head-word," defining the function, and the other performing a syntactic operation.