Ckunsa.

John Bartlett reports for NPR about another attempt to revive a language on the verge of extinction, this one in Chile:

Ckunsa, the language of the Lickanantay people who have lived in the Atacama Desert for more than 11,000 years, was declared “extinct” in the 1950s. But it is still very much alive in the depths of the desert.

“I don’t accept that my native language is extinct,” spits 50–year-old Tomás Vilca under the patchy shade of an awning.[…]

However, Chile is multilingual. Alongside Spanish, Aymara and Quechua are spoken in the north of the country and up into Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina. Down in picturesque Patagonia, there are a handful of Kawésqar speakers; and Mapuzugun, the language of the Mapuche people, Chile’s largest Indigenous group, is spoken widely in the forests and valleys around the Bio Bío River. Out on Easter Island, which has been part of Chilean territory since 1888, Rapanui is spoken by the Indigenous population. […]

“At school they’d tell me I was speaking ‘Bolivian’ – that I wasn’t talking like a Chilean,” remembers Vilca. “They stamped Ckunsa out of us from an early age. After that, my parents started to teach me Spanish so I didn’t suffer any more discrimination.”

From the mid-1800s onwards, there is documentation of Ckunsa in records written by missionaries and others who visited the area. But during Spanish colonial times, public schools had been set up and a process of “hispanization” was sparked. A generation of children were taught Spanish, and there were even reports of physical abuse or fines for those who continued to speak Ckunsa. Slowly, the language was replaced.

“At the educational level, we are working constantly to revitalize ‘dormant’ languages like Ckunsa, Yagán and Kawésqar through the school subject ‘language and culture of ancestral peoples’,” said Margarita Makuc, head of the Chilean Education Ministry’s general education division. […]

Now, up in the Atacama Desert, local initiatives are aiming to bring Ckunsa back. In October 2021, the Semmu Halayna Ckapur Lassi Ckunsa, the ‘first great meeting of the Ckunsa language’, was held in an attempt to plot a way forward for the recuperation of the language. And in May this year, a foundation called Yockontur – the verb to speak in Ckunsa – handed out 1,400 mini Ckunsa dictionaries to primary school students in San Pedro de Atacama.

“Ckunsa has always been used in local meetings and ceremonies, but elsewhere it was a hybrid with Spanish,” says Ilia Reyes Aymani, 50, a local teacher who has written short songs in Ckunsa to teach colors and numbers to the local children. “When they taught you how to sew, for example, they did it in Ckunsa, not Spanish. The language has been there my whole life out in the communities.”

There’s more at the link, including some gorgeous photos; alas, there are no audio clips. I was struck by the odd spelling of the language name — the Wikipedia article has it as Kunza, which is certainly more legible (“Other names and spellings include Cunza, Ckunsa, Likanantaí, Lipe, Ulipe, and Atacameño”). I presume the “ck” indicates some particular voiceless stop, but neither the English article nor the longer Spanish one discusses the spelling system(s). Thanks, cuchuflete!

Comments

  1. There are, among others, a summary of the grammar, by Elizabeth Torrico-Ávila, and a 1896 dictionary, by Emilio F. Vaïsse. The orthography is that of Vaïsse: the glottalized stops and affricate are <tt>, <pp>, and <tch>. Vaïsse (a primary source) describes <ck>: “CK es gutural i se pronuncia como CH en aleman, mas un sonido parecido a R entre la CH alemana i la vocal que sigue.” Torrico-Ávila, following Vaïsse and others, interprets it as /x/. You can hear it here. Vaïsse’s naïve description is pretty accurate.

  2. Thanks!

  3. I’d call it a [χ].

  4. J.W. Brewer says

    I am highly suspicious of the claim that “But during Spanish colonial times, public schools had been set up and a process of ‘hispanization’ was sparked.” Chile threw off Spanish rule during the period roughly from 1810 to 1820. Spain proper at the time had nothing like what we would think of as an organized public school system and had one of the lowest literacy rates in Western Europe. It is hard to believe they were doing better among marginal borderland indigenous populations in their far-flung colonies.

    One of the interesting points I took away from Ostler’s _Empires of the Word_ was that (some) indigenous languages in Central/South America did just fine throughout the colonial period and only started rapidly losing ground to Spanish after independence. It was sort of obvious once pointed out, but it’s the same dynamic as in post-1789 France. If you’re a subject of an absolute monarchy, no one really cares whether or not you can speak the same language as the monarch. But if you’re supposed to be a participating citizen in a new-fangled liberal democracy, goshdarnit you need to be able to speak the One True National Language and we’re gonna make you or at least your kids learn it at bayonet-point if you/they don’t know it already.

  5. Or else the state concentrates on eliminating them, and in the short term doesn’t care what they speak, as for example the Mapuche.

  6. Thanks for those links, Y!

    Something of general interest from p. 13 of Vaïsse’s Glosario :

    Atacama: cabecera de la parroquia de su nombre. Cfr: E. Espinosa. Jeogr. descript. de Chile. 1895. – p. 104. — Nombre que se da al Desierto en la parte comprendida entre el Rio Loa, al norte i el valle de Copiapó al sur.

    Etimolojía: — Puede buscársela tanto en quichua como en lengua atacameña i con bastantes visos de probabilidad

    1.º En quichua: Segun el diccionario quichua-aleman-español de J. I. von Tschudi, p’atacama, significa reunion de jente. Puede que se haya dado ese nombre al Desierto, por los conquistadores incásicos ántes del descubrimiento de Chile o por los numerosos indios quichuistas que acompañaron a Almagro, quien designó a S. Pedro de Atacama como punto de reunion para su jente al regresar al Perú. cfr. Barros Arana. Historia de Chile. Tomo I, parte I, cap. III, páj. 196.

    2.º En lengua atacameña: — Existe la palabra tecar, que significa frio, tener frio: De allí viene: tecama: tengo frio. —Tiene esta etimolojía visos de probabilidad, pues por su clima i por el frio, al ménos nocturno, que reina en el Desierto, merece perfectamente la aplicacion del término atacameño: tecama.

    El señor San Román en su folleto: La lengua Cunza: Santiago, en 1890 propone la siguiente etimolojía, basada tambien en la lengua atacameña: “…refiriéndose los indios arribanos de mas a la cordillera, como los de Peine i Toconao, mas particularmente a la cabecera del pais, decian : Accatch’-cámar sájnema, es decir, yo voi a Atchcámar. ¿Será mucho violentar las teorías etimolójicas si se supone que los españoles principiaron por pronunciar en vez de atck-cámar, atcámar i, por fin, Atacama.” ib. p. 6.

    Dejamos subjudice esta cuestion que, como todo lo que se refiere a etimolojías, se presta a muchas soluciones mas o ménos aproximadas. Loque hai de cierto es que actualmente los atacameños todos, al hablar del pueblo de Atacama, lo nombran sencillamente Lickan, designándolo así como “el pueblo por excelencia.” En cuanto a la rejion atacameña no tienen ellos término especial con que nombrarla: lo que nos induce a creer que el nombre que ésta tiene actualmente le habrá sido dado por los conquistadores incásicos, resultando así mas probable la etimolojía quichua: salvo meliori judicio. ver Lickan.

    Corren otras etimolojías sacadas del castellano, como “Atar Cama”, i del atacameño que por lo fantásticas no merecen discusion. Tschudi cree que viene de patacama, en esta forma: pata, union de muchos; pat’acama, reunion, pataruna id quod patacama (Die Kechua-Sprache, Wien, 1853.—Dritte abtheilung, páj. 428).

  7. Thanks for that very interesting quote. The “I’m going to Atchcámar” idea is of course just as fantástica as “Atar Cama.”

  8. Atacama, meet Atapuerca.

  9. Peter Grubtal says

    @J.W. Brewer

    What you say was obviously one factor. But there may have been more benign motivations and factors involved. Once it’s decided that universal education and literacy is a goal, a whole structure of schools, teacher-training, teaching material and syllabus has to be created. To do this multi- lingually, in countries having several indigenous languages is a whole different kettle of fish. Probably for these languages there is no canonical form or writing system. Even more widespread languages like Quechua were probably in a dialect-continuum state. Education requires its own terminology, which would have to be created in those languages.

    To reduce it to a question of resources looks like a weaselling over-simplification, but realistically it must have played a role.

  10. But there are always resources for what the people who control them really want. Compare the constant outcry over comparatively trivial amounts allocated by Congress to foreign aid to the unquestioned trillions the US spends on the military and other wasteful systems of repression. If the grandees had for whatever reason felt a need to maintain a variety of languages (to display the grandeur and variety of the empire? to illustrate Babel?), the resources would have been found.

  11. J.W. Brewer says

    Put only modestly more cynically than Peter Grubtal’s phrasing, the system of universal education that aims to make the children on which it is imposed more like the specific sort of adults who are devising the system (and thus inculcate those specific adults’ language, their culture, their pedagogical priorities etc.) is almost always going to seem less expensive and easier to administer than the alternatives. Another way to frame it is to think what the motivation is for compulsory/universal education in the first place. For the children’s own good? Ha! It is to turn them into the sort of adults that the power structure in question wishes to have a greater supply of. (Perhaps this is sincerely viewed as incidentally being for their own good, of course.) This does not mean that the system’s goals in that regard cannot sometimes be characterized as “idealistic” or “benevolent,” especially if viewed from a sufficient distance in flattering lighting.

  12. Well put.

  13. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    We have a regularly occurring thing here where the government will tell the universities to close departments that have too few students because the government-imposed admittance quotas have been lowered — and then when they close the Department of Old Norse, the politicians will be all “But think of our HEERITAGE (kulturarv)!” Well, if heritage has a value, the MBAs clearly don’t know what column in their spreadsheets it should go in. And that is in what is still essentially an ethnic monoculture.

    (This half decade they are trying to steer young people to vocational schools instead of the classical gymnasium, but the kids are very sensibly resisting. “So you just increased my cohort’s start age for social pensions to 72, and you want me to become a nursing assistant and wear out my back and knees by 60? Please pull the other one”).

  14. Well put.

    In this specific context you say so (and JWB thinks so, and I think many agree). Because politics.

    But I think if start criticising school education qua education or, worse, question its necessity (be that school vs. homeschooling or, worse, necessity of mandatory school subjects themselves) very same people will disagree.
    Even with JWB’s “For the children’s own good? Ha!

    Moreover, I think most of people who agree with JWB and LH here never ever considered homeschooling or lack of any schooling for their own children.

  15. Though questioning the value of education feels a bit weird given my own role in informal math education.

    But that’s easy: I do it for myself:) For interested children too, but you don’t kiss your spouse “for her own good” because you’re so selfless and everything. People communicate with people and change each other, to good or not. Perhaps same applies to some missionaries.

  16. Speaking of our own good: our goverment upgraded the equipment they placed at ISPs, and youtube ceased to work in Russia. Then it worked again, and now it does not and google books too. Just complaining. Also they began to disrupt work of VPN.

  17. J.W. Brewer says

    In a society where universal education is and has been for some time an established thing, it is eccentric and perhaps risky to try to opt out. In a society where it has not yet become a thing although there are some rumblings to that effect out from the direction of the capital city where some soi-disant reforming liberals have recently seized power by violent means, some huge percentage of the adult population will be demonstrably getting on with their lives without its benefit. Perhaps it will seem obvious that those folks are having less full and enjoyable adult lives than if they’d had X years of compulsory schooling, perhaps not, or perhaps it would even be a good context to pursue the “well, it might rather depend on the content and style of those X years of compulsory schooling” inquiry.

  18. “rumblings to that effect out from the direction of the capital city where some soi-disant reforming liberals”

    I’m not sure, whose thoughts and actions we’re evaluating here.

    – liberals: well, they’re a minority and reformers. That is they would be “excentric” if they did not have the means for takeover. And?

    – random individuals: then I disagree. Basically, the difference is that we’re speaking of change.
    For a poor farmer’s daughter joining the tiny educated elite or even those who work for the elite will make a difference (and can be a good idea). School for her is a lift, vertically towards having more resources, horizontally into a different culture.
    (of course in pre-industrial times “resources” are limited and are intimately connected to “power”. “Elite” are literally people who have servants – and of course no matter how universal your education is, “everyone” can’t “have servants”)

    Compared to this, most of us here are not interested in lifts. We are interested in maintenance, that is, we expect our children to become “like us”, not “richier”. So the question is: will a child who receives no schooling either before university or high school or at all (including degrees) become as knowlegeable/educated/… as surrounding people? Like farmers if she’s a farmer’s daugher. Like scholars if in her circle everyone is a scholar. I know one such example, and described it here.

    – culturologically it is of course changing one culture for another which is not good.

  19. “eccentric” – I think you’re repeating what I said, just laconically.

    I wrote about opinions (the range from “the school is just fine as is” to “we don’t need anything like it at all”) and behaviour (“my children study in a normal school” to “they don’t study at all”).
    Within both ranges there are many possible attitudes. Moreover “no schooling at all” is impossible.*

    I’m not sure what you’re speaking about. Perhaps “behaviour” and specifically the impossible extreme.

    If it is opinions, then the argumentation is circular: “everyone is doing it this way, so questioning doing it or the way we do it is excentric”.

    If it is behaviour, then you’re agreeing with me, that is: people here (on this forum) care not about “children’s own good” (Ha!) but merely about making them experience what you’ve experienced and what other children are experiencing.
    So what I meant is that this indifference to interests of children is more common than some may think.

    And if it is the impossible extreme, then first it is impossible and second my point is that vast majority of people choose the other extreme. Their children go to a “normal school” and they think this school is perfect.

    Surely, they also grumble at the educational system. But this grumbling is vaguely formulated in terms of “quality” and is more about the practical realisation of an excellent plan (like “this pipe is leaking!”) rather than about the plan itself (“we need two larger pipes, not one narrow pipe. Also it is in the wrong place”). Often it is “in my time they taught it properly, now teachers are silly, textbooks are silly, and everyone is too undemanding”. In other words, “I don’t want reforms, I want better results, and ‘the better result’ is myself!”.

    Perhaps not everything in our school then is as planned by a ‘power structure’ (which you define as “power structure in question”) as a “rational” way of achieving a goal.
    Much of it is just everyone mindlessly doing what everyone mindlessly have been doing, and agency of people like local commenters may play as large a role as that of members of any power structure.

    *Why:
    No one will prevent her child from acquiring any knowledge. If you just behave normally, you tell your child whatever you want her to know, also whatever you just enjoy telling, also she will learn from you on her own and also she is going to have access to your library and the internet. This “what you want her to know” is at least some of school curriculum (moreover distinguishing between “wanting her to know”, “wanting her to know because others know it, even though…” and “wanting to know because it is in school curriculum” is not easy and the thrid is “homeschooling”) so we will need to define “schooling” as either formal approach to teaching or maybe systematically teaching the whole of the curriculum or…

    My children will be exposed to several langauges (just playing with children who don’t speak Russian is enough to pick something) and more math than school offers even if I will be “against any schooling” (and I’m not…).

  20. Er.
    It happens to me that when I’m sleepy I type longer texts than when I’m not.
    Yesterday I was not merely sleepy, basically already sleeping when I typed this one. Sorry, it was meant to be a very SHORT comment:))) Basically the first three paragraphs, something like that.

    I don’t know how come that it is so long:)

  21. Ha! Don’t worry, it happens to us all.

  22. As far as I know, only me:) But normally it is:

    “I can think clearly, I can express it in a few lines in a couple of minutes”
    vs.
    “I can’t think clearly, I type two pages with lots of details, then I delete this, then I delete that and it has already taken too much time and if I’m going to keep editing it until it is just a few lines I’ll have to spend much more so I’m sending it as is”.

  23. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” It’s not just you.

  24. Stu Clayton says

    Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte

    Another sorry excuse for failing to meet expectations, like the guy who wrote

    cujus rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.

    Today we say “the dog ate my homework”, with less forfanterie, but it still implies “I would of if I could of”.

  25. David Eddyshaw says

    My very best comments are the ones I delete in their entirety before submitting. Quite moving, some of them.

  26. Are they best before or after the deletion?

  27. David Eddyshaw says

    They transcend the moment of deletion. In their deletion is their completion.

    Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

  28. One might think of the infinite moment when the universe has collapsed in on itself before bursting forth in another Big Bang.

  29. David Eddyshaw says

    One might. One might.

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