The Calusa: Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships

4. The Source of the Calusa Language

4 The source of the Calusa Language ThedatawehaveontheCalusalanguagefortunatelyprovidesolidinformationonthesourceandnaturebothofthatlanguage ,thepeople who spoke it, and the culture of which they were a part. Though the data may seem minimal to many, it is linguistically sound, definitive , and unequivocal. We have contemporary spanish translations for only a dozen lexical forms in the Calusa language. Ten come from the 1575 Memoir of hernando de escalante fontaneda (1944, n.d.), who, as pointed out earlier, lived as a captive with the Calusa from childhood at the age of 13 to the age of 30 and became a fluent speaker of the language and a knowledgeable member of the culture (escalante fontaneda 1944, n.d.). The eleventh, mahoma, comes from a 1697 letter from fr. feliciano López to fr. Pedro Taybo (reproduced in translation in hann 1991:158–161); and the twelfth, sipi, is found in a 1743 Informe from fr. Joseph Xavier de Alaña to his superiors, reproduced in the original spanish in an ethnographic article by the late William sturtevant (1978:154–161). escalante fontaneda’s Memoir contains 60 aboriginal words, largely toponyms, in native florida languages, 37 of which refer to places or peoples in the lands from approximately the mouth of the suwan- 20 / Chapter 4 nee River or the Withlacoochee River south along the Gulf coastal strip to the Charlotte harbor area and in south florida from the Gulf to the Atlantic in the latitudes from Lake Okeechobee south to and including the Keys. Thirty-two additional forms come from a Memorandum accompanying the Memoir and a third recently discovered document appended to the Memorandum (Worth 1995). Of the latter words 20 come from the above-defined geographical regions, bringing the grand total of known Calusa language forms to 69 plus a few additional suspect toponyms, such as Kissimmee, not explicitly identified by language in any source but attributed, with translation, by local seminole indian as well as south Central florida Anglo tradition as Calusa. Of the 11 forms for which translations are provided by escalante fontaneda five—Cuchiyaga, Guaru(n)gu(n)be, Guasaca Esgui, Mayaimi, and Ño—are place names; two—Cañogacola and Carlos—are the names of tribal groups; one—sipi—is the name of a deity; two— mahoma and tejiEue—are the names of building types; and one— seletega—isasingle-wordsentence.nonehasademonstrableoreven possible etymology in either Timucua or Apalachee, the two dominant languages of the peninsula in late prehistoric and early historic times, nor do they show any relationship to the toponyms we have for Ais, mayaca, Jororo, and surruque, the remaining native languages of florida. The putative “translations” provided in the mid-1800s by the Choctaw leader Peter Pichlynn for buckingham smith (smith 1854) are random Calusa–Choctaw sound-alikes. As unsophisticated fractured Choctaw they are, in my opinion, best forgotten. Unless one accepts the Pichlynn-smith renditions, there remain only two viable ways for handling this small amount of data, imperfect though they may be: (1) ignore the data as though they did not exist, which has been the choice of all to date without exception, or source of the Calusa Language / 21 (2) do what can be done with them using the analytical techniques of modern synchronic and diachronic linguistics, the latter with the full realization that the outcome can only be an empirically derived and empirically testable hypothesis. i have opted for the latter on the premise that a database is there, and ignoring it will not make it go away. The hypothesis i propose is just that, not a set of rocksolid conclusions, and it can and should be further tested against additional linguistic, ethnographic, and archaeological data as, and if, they become available. escalante fontaneda (1944, n.d.) lists and discusses six latesixteenth -century aboriginal ethnic and/or political entities in florida south of the suwannee and Withlacoochee rivers on the west coast of florida and south of the Cape Canaveral region on the east coast ofthepeninsula:(1)thesouthwestflorida,Charlotteharborregion (Carlos), (2) the inland Lake Okeechobee region (Guacata), (3) the Keys (called only by the spanish term Martires), (4) the miami region on the southeast Atlantic coast (Tequesta), (5) the area around Tampa bay (Tocobaga), and (6) the Gulf coastal region to the north of Tampa bay (Cañogacola). it is these regions for which we have the greatest number of non-muskogean, non-Timucua toponyms. Of the dozen translated forms to be discussed here two...