I was reading about a recent documentary called Nuestra Tierra (apparently translated as both Our Land and Landmarks), which “examines issues of land ownership in Argentina and interrogates the role of this history in the murder of Javier Chocobar, a Chuschagasta leader in the struggle for indigenous land rights,” and of course wanted to know more about the Chuschagasta and their striking ethnonym — what language did they speak, for instance? There was no link attached to the word in that Wikipedia article, so I tried Indigenous languages of the Americas with no luck, even though its long list of “Widely-spoken and officially-recognized indigenous languages” went all the way down to languages with zero speakers. The List of Indigenous languages of Argentina and Indigenous peoples in Argentina were likewise no help. Eventually I googled up Manuel Lizondo Borda’s Estudios de voces tucumanas, Vol. 1, Voces tucumanas derivadas del quechua (M. Violetto & cia., 1927; Google Books, HathiTrust), where on p. 168 we find “CHUSCHA, n.p.”:
ORIG.: De CHHUJCHA: cabello (I; III, p. 176 y 239). La razón de nuestras acepciones 2ᵃ, 3ᵃ y 4ᵃ, parece estar, o está, en un poblado indígena llamado Chuschagasta o Chugchagasta (V. II parte), situado más o menos donde hoy se halla Chuscha, 2ᵃ acep.. Y habitantes de ese poblado, trasladados a Chuscha, 3ᵃ acep., dieron sin duda el nombre a este lugar; y de éste se originó seguramente el del río citado.
G. Holguín y Torres Rubio registran la voz quichua citado.
So apparently the name of the people is derived from the Quechua word given in Wiktionary as chukcha ‘hair’; I still don’t know what language they speak or anything more about them (or why they’re called both Chuschagasta and Chugchagasta), but let this serve as a reminder that there are many things in heaven and earth that are beyond the ken of Wikipedia.
Here are recordings of the word for ‘hair’ in a number of Quechua varieties (hover over the word to play.)
But this is probably not a Quechua word. -gasta is a locative in Cacán (= Diaguita?), a poorly documented isolate language. That locative shows up in many placenames of the area, most famously Antofagasta.
Wow, that Sounds of the Andean Languages site is great.
From that Cacán link: “The language was documented in a grammar by Barcena, but the manuscript is lost.” Argh!
An interview with the director says (I don’t know how reliably?) that the ancestors of the group in question had shifted to speaking Spanish before 1700 but before that spoke the aforementioned-yet-mysterious Cacan. Quechua is interesting because like Spanish it was an “intrusive” langauge imported to the area via colonial/imperial expansion, but got there maybe a scant century before Spanish did but still had time to have an effect.* I think there were some areas where the Spanish encouraged speakers of other indigenous languages to pick up Quechua so there could be one commonly understood L2 by the indigenes in the area if getting them to all learn Spanish seemed too ambitious, but I don’t know if that extended to this part of what ended up as part of Argentina.
*Indeed the first Spanish conquistadores in that part of Argentina came over the mountains from Peru like the Incas before them rather than coming upstream/uphill from Buenos Aires.
Quechua is interesting because like Spanish it was an “intrusive” langauge imported to the area via colonial/imperial expansion, but got there maybe a scant century before Spanish did but still had time to have an effect.*
Yes, we saw the effects of that with the durned ‘cumar’ word: the first (wrong) claim was that the word is Quechua. Further clarification showed it was from a language spoken in the Gulf of Guayaquil, whose speakers had been colonised by the Inca and transported to the mountains, where ‘cumar’ was recorded by a Spanish priest. IIRC we don’t even know the name of the language it came from.
> (or why they’re called both Chuschagasta and Chugchagasta)
My first guess is that the ‘g’ and ‘s’ are both attempts to render a fricative like /x/ or /h/, from a Rioplatense Spanish perspective.
@AntC –
yes, that figures. In Ecuador recently I was surprised to hear that Quechua was the indigenous language in areas only relatively briefly occupied by the Incas.
My first guess is that the ‘g’ and ‘s’ are both attempts to render a fricative like /x/ or /h/, from a Rioplatense Spanish perspective.
Ah, that must be right.
Mention of Quechua reminds me of a post of June 2022 in which I said
As far as I can tell from searching the web David is still alive in Eureka at the age of 98, but I don’t think he’s active in news groups any more. Anyway, as there are people here who know more about Quechua than I do I wonder if someone can comment on his characterization of it. If it’s really as regular and exception-free as he said that might explain its widespread adoption after the Inca conquests.
A 1979 paper by Ricardo Nardi, “El kakán, lengua de los Diaguitas” (OCRed) puts together presumably all the bits known about the language. It is surprisingly and pleasingly conservative and low on slop and implausible speculation. Unfortunately that means that there are very few words with a known translation, including loanwords.
It lists local words which may be of Kakán/Cacán origin, by force of being local, with no other known etymology, and agreeing with Kakán phonotactics. One is chuschín, some kind of passerine bird. The -in is not an apparent Kakán morpheme, though.
Quechua is as rigidly mechanical and free of exceptions and irregularities as Esperanto
Very regular, sure. 100.0% is a pretty high standard.
If it’s really as regular and exception-free as he said that might explain its widespread adoption after the Inca conquests.
Morphological irregularity never stopped a language from becoming widespread (see English, French). At most, people adopt it and smooth over the irregularities.
Sticking with the Americas, Nahuatl is hardly a simple language, but that didn’t stop its widespread adoption as an interlanguage. (Armies and vanguard merchants can be quite an encouragement when it comes to language adoption, I imagine.)
Admittedly, Nahuatl is not too complicated in terms of its morphophonemics (its many difficulties mostly lie elsewhere.) I think that’s what David Kleinecke was probably driving at re Quechua: the Quechua languages go in for pretty impressive agglutination, but the morphemes tend to combine in a fairly lego-like way.)
The same relative transparency of word formation mostly obtains in the heroically polysynthetic language Bininj Gun-wok, which apparently has expanded a fair bit at the expense of its Australian neighbours. Creole-like, it’s not.
On the other hand, Russian has spread over vast areas of Eurasia entirely because of its famous linguistic simplicity. Even small children can speak it (an observation I stole from Primo Levi.)
Yes. Given the timeframe, however – if nothing else – this predicts that Quechua today has more irregularities where it’s at home than where it only expanded to around the Spanish conquest.
I know that some kinds of Quechua have only one kind of plosives while others add aspirates and ejectives, which don’t seem to occur frequently. I know nothing about the geography of this.
I read somewhere that the extra plosive series are imports from Aymara: the WP article confusedly (and citationlessly) seems to agree.
Regarding geography, it says:
If the ejectives and aspirates are loan phonemes, it’d make sense if they were fairly rare.
Yes; I think I also read somewhere that they’re not loan phonemes, but I have no quick-and-easy way to find out.
David Weber’s grammar of Huallaga Quechua (a “Quechua B” language from Peru) indeed reports that it has only one (unvoiced) stop series, though b d g appear in loans from Spanish and in some onomatopoeic words.
Sounds rather like /h/ in Kusaal, confined to loans like hali “until” (a very common word) and words like hɛɛs “call out ‘hey!’ to.”) In other words, actually a perfectly real part of the phonemic inventory, but interestingly restricted in distribution.
While it’s no doubt entirely reasonable in this case to conclude that the ancestor of Huallaga Quechua lacked /b d g/ completely, it’s actually not unheard of for languages to have phonemes confined to particular vocabulary items (like Arabic pharyngealised l) or particular word categories (like ideophones.)