[Aztlan] Island-Mainland Contact

[Nick Hopkins]

Dito--  The source is Julian Granberry, A Grammar and Dictionary of  
the Timucua Language, The University of Alabama Press, 1993.  This is  
basically THE source for Timucua (he inherited John Swanton's  
materials on Timucua and has studied all the colonial Spanish  
documents).  The specific words are hinino (from Taino hynino  
'tobacco') and casino (Ilex vomitoria), which he doesn't source in  
the dictionary but which I believe I checked out and found it was  
Taino; at any rate, it has that three-syllable shape that Taino words  
tend to have.  There is another Timucua term for Ilex, ipopi, which  
derives from the native term ipo 'to charm or bewitch, to take  
medicine'.  Ilex was the basis of the quintessential ceremonial  
beverage in the Southeast, "black drink," (still) used as a purgative  
to cleanse the body before ceremonies.  It is also the secret  
ingredient in Coca Cola, which started out in Georgia as a medicinal  
and then became a refreshment, like Smilax (zarza parilla), used as a  
medicinal (for veneral disease) in the 16th century and which later  
became the "sasparilla" famously drunk by wimps in Western movies.

Anyway, the Spanish borrowed "tobaco," not "hinino," so I don't think  
this word came through Spanish.  The European-introduced diseases got  
to the Southeast well before the Europeans, so I don't think there is  
any doubt that they had canoe-borne contact.  There was a huge  
precolumbian trade route that ran from south Florida across the Gulf  
coast and up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers (as witness the  
distribution of the trade language called Mobilian (based on Choctaw)  
and the existence of trading outposts of Siouans at Biloxi and  
(Granberry argues) Tunicas at Calusa.

I agree that the stones at Crystal River are intriguing.  The main  
problem is that the archaeology establishment in North America  
declared the topic of south-north influence a taboo topic in the  
1960s, just after Ford's monograph on the Formative, tracing the  
distribution of common traits from South and North America, appeared  
(with the provocative subtitle "Diffusion or Psychic Unity?").

Fortunately, the topic seems to be opening up again, and I think we  
are in line for a paradigm shift.  A huge barrier is the  
compartmentalization of knowledge, with North Americanists not  
knowing about the Caribbean, etc.  It's like it used to be in Mexico,  
where you studied either Central Mexico, Oaxaca, or the Mayan area,   
Now we understand that they were all interconnected, and you can't  
understand one of them without knowing about the others..

Nick

On Oct 20, 2006, at 12:43 PM, Dito Morales wrote:

> Thanks Nick! That's very interesting. I'll check out Granberry. Is  
> there any discussion about this linguistic loan being post- or pre- 
> Columbus? I'm simply not that familiar with Southeastern sources. I  
> think there was less than a couple of generations between contact  
> on Hispaniola and Florida. Do you think these Taino loanwords could  
> have been introduced via Spanish travel between the Antilles and  
> Florida (by their Taino 'assistants')?
>
> Also, I've always been interested in the two limestone 'stelae'  
> found at the Crystal River site (Bullen 1966), one of which looks  
> remarkably like the type of karst speleothem 'face' sculptures  
> found throughout the Caribbean. Again, the Southeast is not my  
> area, but I'm not familiar with anything else like this in  
> Southeasten sculpture or rock art. I wonder if this could be  
> another possible loan from the island Taino? Food for thought, anyway.
>
> Dito
>
> _________________________________________________
> Reinaldo Morales Jr., Assistant Professor of Art History
> Department of Art, University of Central Arkansas
> 201 Donaghey Ave., MAC 101, Conway, AR 72035
> _________________________________________________
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Nicholas Hopkins
> To: aztlan at lists.famsi.org
> Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 10:33 AM
> Subject: Re: [Aztlan] Island-Mainland Contact
>
> RE Ronald L. Canter's note on Caribbean-Florida contacts (inter
> alia), the words for tobacco and Ilex (yaupon) in Timucua (the
> dominant indigenous group of north and central Florida) are loanwords
> from Taino (see Granberry's dictionary of Timucua).  You don't get
> loanwords without contact.
>
> Nick Hopkins
>
> _______________________________________________
> Aztlan mailing list
> Aztlan at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/aztlan
>