Quechua/Kichwa

[The Peloric Orchid]

Please excuse me if this is already common knowledge, but something that I think needs to be clarified is the amount of dialectal variation in Quechua/Kichwa. I'm bringing this up because I'm under the impression that Quechua is notorious for it's series of ejectives (especially the uvular one). However, I'm studying abroad in Quito for the fall semester and I'm taking Kichwa 1 and I have yet to hear an uvular ejective. According to my professor and some subsequent research, the "harsh" sounds (aka the ejectives) are characteristic of the Cuzco dialect which is markedly different from the Ecuadorian dialect I'm learning. Basically, next time you guys read or writes something about Quechua and its (uvular) ejectives, just remember that these sounds are absent from the phonemic inventories of many speakers. If you ever learn Kichwa, hopefully you'll be spared the confusion and worry of not learning the sounds you think you're supposed to be learning!

By the way, in Ecuador the language is called Kichwa and supposedly the name Quechua also comes from Cuzco, which might explain why the Cuzco variant seems to be the better known one.

[----]

You are correct; the ejectives only exist in the Cuzco dialect and in (some varieties of?) Bolivian Quechua. The reason why we use Quechua as the name of the language in English is probably because the Cuzco dialect is taken to be the standard by the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua. But don't be worried, much like other language academies, no one cares what the AMLQ has to say.

[zompist]

The name "Quechua" derives from qheswa 'temperate valley', i.e. the region where Quechua speakers lived. It's not related to Qosqo (= Cusco).

(By the way, "Kichwa" is probably a back-borrowing from Spanish. Different dialects refer to the language in different ways— in Cusqueño and Ayacuchano it's Runa Simi.)

Ecuadorean Quechua is actually not that far from Cusqueño, but yeah, it has neither the ejectives nor the aspirated stops.

[sirdanilot]

Please excuse me if this is already common knowledge, but something that I think needs to be clarified is the amount of dialectal variation in Quechua/Kichwa. I'm bringing this up because I'm under the impression that Quechua is notorious for it's series of ejectives (especially the uvular one). However, I'm studying abroad in Quito for the fall semester and I'm taking Kichwa 1 and I have yet to hear an uvular ejective. According to my professor and some subsequent research, the "harsh" sounds (aka the ejectives) are characteristic of the Cuzco dialect which is markedly different from the Ecuadorian dialect I'm learning. Basically, next time you guys read or writes something about Quechua and its (uvular) ejectives, just remember that these sounds are absent from the phonemic inventories of many speakers. If you ever learn Kichwa, hopefully you'll be spared the confusion and worry of not learning the sounds you think you're supposed to be learning!

By the way, in Ecuador the language is called Kichwa and supposedly the name Quechua also comes from Cuzco, which might explain why the Cuzco variant seems to be the better known one.

Wait, so you went to Quito to study a Quechuan language but you did not take the effort to read about this a bit beforehand? Good lord...... Go read Adelaar and Muysken 2004 or something next time you're going to study an Andean language somewhere or one of the massive Aikhenvald tomes on the languages of south america. I don't get why people don't do even a minimum of research before doing this kind of stuff. It's not like it takes all day to look up some of this stuff in the library you know.

Quechua is a generic name for a large group of closely (and also slightly less closely) related languages spoken in the Andes. There is a lot of difference between the dialects/languages sometimes to the point of them being incomprehensible for speakers of each other. The Bolivian Quechuan languages are more influenced by Aymara (which is also a related language, though there are doubts on the nature of this relationship) than other Quechua dialects.

There have been publications claiming that Aymara and Quechua are not genetically related, but rather their resemblance comes from very long language contact in the past, with Aymara being the 'model' language that changed pre-Quechua (supposedly quite different, if at all related, to Aymara) to what is now known as Quechua.

[sirdanilot]

It's like going to China expecting to learn 'Chinese' but you come out speaking Cantonese rather than Mandarin or something, haha.

Okay a bit less extreme than that but still.

[zompist]

There have been publications claiming that Aymara and Quechua are not genetically related [...]

Heck, I'll claim just that. I've looked very carefully at multiple Quechua dialects and Aymara, and there are two very obvious subsections of vocabulary:

1 - near-identical words, often much closer between Cusqueño/Aymara than the variation between Quechuan languages
2 - completely unrelated words

That is, I wasn't able to identify any subset of vocabulary that showed any significant sound changes since divergence. And category (2) is very large. Plus there's almost no similarity in the morphology.

The simplest explanation is that the languages aren't related, but some massive borrowing went on one way or the other, relatively recently. The level of borrowing is similar to the French and Latin borrowings in English, or the Chinese borrowings in Japanese.

Campbell claims to have some evidence for relatedness, but I haven't seen his work on this. (If it was really striking I think he'd have put it in his American Indian Languages.)

[sirdanilot]

I refer to the following for more information on this:


Muysken, P. 2012. Modelling the Quechua-Aymara relationship: Structural features, sociolinguistic scenarios and possible archeological evidence

Forgot what journal it was in but I can send you the pdf if you want.

I think that in South America borrowing is more of structures and less of actual word forms. You see this also in the Vaupés region of Amazonia, with multiple genetically unrelated languages borrowing structures from each other. Most lexical borrowing that has been going on has been from dominating languages, such as Quechua (in the Andes), Spanish and Portuguese. Oftentimes simply to express new concepts, but also for existing concepts.

Why is this so? I have no idea. It might have to do with something cultural. I think that it is a very interesting field to research, but it might also be impossible to answer this. I think the best route to take would be an anthropological view on why words from other tribes (with which there has often be century-long intensive contact) are not borrowed, though 'foreign' structures do seep into the language (probably unconsciously). I don't think pure linguistics can answer this, since the very nature of language contact processes seems different from that in other parts of the world.

[zompist]

I'd love to get the PDF.

IIRC the Vaupés languages are linked by a complicated inter-marriage scheme, which facilitates people learning each other's languages and merging structures.

Dixon found massive structural and lexical borrowing in Australia too that fit a diffusionist model rather than one of genetic descent.

[So Haleza Grise]

Dixon found massive structural and lexical borrowing in Australia too that fit a diffusionist model rather than one of genetic descent.

It seems like most other Australianists have rejected Dixon's diffusion model though. Personally though, some of the corpuses are fairly small I have the impression it must be hard to do comparative work with Australian languages in general.

[The Peloric Orchid]

Wait, so you went to Quito to study a Quechuan language but you did not take the effort to read about this a bit beforehand? Good lord...... Go read Adelaar and Muysken 2004 or something next time you're going to study an Andean language somewhere or one of the massive Aikhenvald tomes on the languages of south america. I don't get why people don't do even a minimum of research before doing this kind of stuff. It's not like it takes all day to look up some of this stuff in the library you know.

It's like going to China expecting to learn 'Chinese' but you come out speaking Cantonese rather than Mandarin or something, haha.

Okay a bit less extreme than that but still.

Hahaha I didn't go to Quito for the sole purpose of studying Kichwa, it was more a perk. I went to Quito to so I could practice my Spanish in a Spanish-speaking country. I study plant biology but since I'm graduating in May and I'm almost done with all my requirements I decided to take fun/interesting classes like Kichwa, architectural drawing, architecture of Greece and Rome, and agrobiotechnology. I decided to take Kichwa because someone who did the same exchange program before me told me that there's a lot Kichwa in Quiteño slang so he suggested that I take it. Of course, whenever I told an Ecuadorian I was taking a beginner Kichwa class they all though it was hilarious because it's supposed to be a hard language to learn and Kichwa hasn't actually influenced Quiteño Spanish that much, or at least not to the extent I was led to believe by my acquaintance.

Anyway, thanks for literature recommendation. I'll see if my home university's library has it.

[sirdanilot]

Ah if it was but a side endeavour that explains it.

It may not be your field within plant biology but native knowledge of plants is very, very underestimated by Western science. A combination of a descriptive linguistic and a biology- approach can be very fruitful when investigating the flora (and fauna for that matter) of a certain area. Just asking natives to sum up the names of plant species in a certain area or biotope can give lists of dozens of plant names, people have extraordinary knowledge of the direct surroundings they live in much more than we have left in our urban western societies. Heck even if I would look at my grandfather he had much more knowledge of it than I do since at least he was a farmer more connected to nature than me living in an urban environment, this goes much more for natives who have a horticultural and/or hunter-gatherer life style.
I would like to look into this sort of thing when doing field work, but of course I have no training whatsoever in determining the species of a certain plant; conversely, many biologists have no training in the local native language and no training in doing linguistic fieldwork.

[Trebor]

I decided to take Kichwa because someone who did the same exchange program before me told me that there's a lot Kichwa in Quiteño slang so he suggested that I take it. Of course, whenever I told an Ecuadorian I was taking a beginner Kichwa class they all though it was hilarious because it's supposed to be a hard language to learn and Kichwa hasn't actually influenced Quiteño Spanish that much, or at least not to the extent I was led to believe by my acquaintance.

What are your views in retrospect of the course and the language? How was Kichwa taught, and did you find it as difficult as was claimed?