Quechua
Quechua (Quechua,
Runa Simi) is an
American Indian language native to
South America and related to
Aymará, both members of the Quechumaran linguistic stock. It was the official language of the
Tawantinsuyu (
Inca Empire), and today is spoken in various dialects by some 8 to 13 million people throughout South America. The language's dominion spans the entire South American continent starting as far north as southern
Colombia and
Ecuador,
Peru and
Bolivia, and northwestern
Argentina and northern
Chile. The dialect as it is spoken in Colombia and Ecuador is known as
Quichua (Quichua,
Runa Shimi), and because of its frequent unintelligibility with the main branch of the language, it borders on being classed as separate. Despite this, all dialects are nonetheless considered a single tongue, consequently making it the most widely spoken of all
American Indian languages in the
Americas.
The language was extended beyond the limits of the empire by the
Catholic Church, which chose it to preach to Indians in the
Andes area. It has, along with
Spanish and Aymará, the status of an official language in both Peru and Bolivia. Before the arrival of the Spaniards and the Spanish language, Quechua had no written alphabet, instead, it had a system of accountance with
khipu-strings.
Quechua is a very regular language, but a large number of infixes and suffixes change both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning, allowing great expressiveness. It includes grammatical features such as bipersonal conjugation and conjugation dependent on mental state and veracity of knowledge, spatial and temporal relationships, and many cultural factors. Later the Spanish impact resulted in the Spanish turning the Quechua language into script by method of translation.
Quechua Loanwords
A number of Quechua loanwords have entered English via Spanish, including coca, condor, guano, gaucho, jerky, inca, llama, pampa, potato (from papa via patata), puma, quinoa, and vicuña . The word lagniappe comes from the Quechua word nyap ("something extra") with the article la in front of it, la ñapa, in Spanish.
Quechua spelling and pronunciation
Vowels
\nQuechua has only three vowels: /i/, /a/, and /u/, similar to Classical Arabic. These are usually pronounced roughly as in Spanish, however, when the closed vowels /i/ and /u/ appear adjacent to the uvular consonants /q/, /q'/, and /qh/, they are rendered more like [e] and [o] respectively.
Consonants
\n
The consonant inventory seems a bit strange to
Indo-European speakers. None of the plosives or fricatives are voiced; voicing is not
phonemic in Quechua. However, in many dialects, each plosive has three forms: simple, with
glottal stop, and with
aspiration. For example:
simple ejective aspirated\n p p' ph\n t t' th\n ch ch' chh\n k k' kh\n q q' qh
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