Teo Armus writes for the Washington Post (February 23, archived) about a woman who is trying to preserve Quechua language and culture:
Before she can begin filming her online radio show, María Luz Coca Luján must first transform herself into “K’ancha,” a digital persona dressed like the Indigenous “cholitas” of her native Bolivia. So on one recent afternoon, she hustled back home to swap out her construction attire for that traditional outfit — a colorful, billowing skirt, dangling gold jewelry, a bowler hat atop her neatly braided hair — and then started live-streaming. […]
Soon there were hundreds tuned in — from Madrid, Chile, New York — as the 32-year-old launched into a chatty monologue that rapidly became a vocabulary lesson in Quechua, the Indigenous South American language she has been battling to keep alive. “Tell me all the words that you all use to convey anger,” she told them. “Let’s build our dictionary in Quechua, yeah?”
In Northern Virginia, home to the largest Bolivian population in the United States, this regular broadcast has helped Coca Luján, a.k.a. K’ancha, fashion herself into something between a social media influencer and cultural preservationist for this community of 40,000. […]
“She’s not presenting it for an outsider. She’s tailoring it to the people who are part of the culture,” said Karen Vallejos, a Bolivian American who grew up in Northern Virginia and now runs an area nonprofit for undocumented youth. “She’s using slang, she’s using nicknames, things people from the community would understand. … [Young people] see her dressed up in the clothes their grandma would wear, and they want to know more.”
A handful of other Bolivian women play a similar role in Northern Virginia, each with their own social-media radio show and following across the diaspora. They all self-identify as cholitas, or women who claim their Indigenous Andean heritage and preserve this style of dress. But K’ancha, who studied Quechua in graduate school before coming to the United States, has seemingly been the most intent on using her microphone and ring light as tools to keep her heritage alive. […]
Growing up in Bolivia’s Valle Alto highlands, Coca Luján rarely wore the outfit that has become synonymous with the region’s cholitas — especially not the pollera, or long skirt. Although Bolivia has one of the largest Indigenous populations in South America — more than two-thirds of the national population, by some measures — that type of dress and the heritage it stood for were looked down upon and stereotyped.
In a country governed by people with mostly European ancestry, these Indigenous women were relegated to the fringes of society. (The word “cholita” derives from “chola,” a term for Indigenous women that took on a derogatory tone.) […]
When a grass-roots, Indigenous movement spread through Bolivia in the early 2000s, though, conditions for cholitas finally started to change. That push culminated in the rise of the left-wing leader Evo Morales, who repealed laws targeting cholitas and required all public-sector workers to learn an Indigenous language such as Quechua.
“What I started understanding is that there was something in me that was connected to the culture and to Quechua,” Coca Luján said. She dove into her native tongue, even enrolling in graduate school to further study the language she had once shunned. […]
Coca Luján had always been painfully shy, she said, even when first getting involved in the local performance scene. But when a Bolivian DJ asked her to speak in Quechua on his Facebook Live radio show, she did not hesitate. “If there is something about this country that I have to highlight,” Coca Luján said, “it’s that perhaps it has taught me to dare to do many things, to have a lot of courage.”
She went to Best Buy to purchase a laptop, practicing over and over in live-streams that only she could watch. She adopted the name K’ancha, which translates to “light,” just like her name in Spanish. Soon, she found such an enthusiastic fan base that she launched her own radio show.
There’s lots more about her personal story and about the community; this kind of thing seems more likely to succeed in keeping a language alive than dogged classroom work. (And if you’re wondering, cholo is apparently of uncertain origin, though back in 1933 the OED said it was “American Spanish, < Cholollán, now Cholula, a district of Mexico.”)
(And if you’re wondering, cholo is apparently of uncertain origin, though back in 1933 the OED said it was “American Spanish, < Cholollán, now Cholula, a district of Mexico.”)
The Diccionario de la RAE offers:
cholo, la
1. adj. Arg., Bol., C. Rica, Ec., Pan., Perú y R. Dom. Mestizo de sangre europea e indígena. U. t. c. s.
2. adj. Ec., Méx., Pan. y Perú. Dicho de un indio: Que adopta los usos occidentales.
I don’t find “online radio show” an acceptable term for something with a video feed. But maybe others differ.
I also love that style of Andean women’s dress. Except for the bowlers. I don’t get the bowlers.
I, on the other hand, love the bowlers, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
The usual AmEng meaning of cholo/a with which I’m familiar is what wiktionary has as “(derogatory) A Mexican or Hispanic gang member, or somebody perceived to embody similar characteristics.” I think of it as a Southern-Californianism, although I guess I don’t have affirmative evidence that it isn’t also e.g. a Texanism. But it’s not about degrees of mestizoness or indigeneity. The meaning may be otherwise in Bolivian Spanish, of course.
Even w/o knowing Spanish, cholita as a diminutive of chola is more or less transparent to me, but I can’t say I’ve encountered it in English.
How did the bowler hats become part of the ‘traditional’ apparel? Was there an invasion of Bolivia by hordes of mid-level British civil servants sometime in the 19th century?
I largely agree w/ Brett’s judgment of unacceptability.* Part of the whole point of doing radio is that you don’t need to worry about wardrobe/hair/makeup before going on the air! That said, there’s been blurring and crossover in recent-ish years. Perhaps a sign of the End Times?
*I also have a gripe about “online radio.” Lots of radio stations extend their audiences via internet livestreaming beyond their broadcast range, but I am dubious about online-only things billing themselves as radio, although that’s definitely a thing that some of the Young People say and do … Those are just real-time podcasts, say I! Of course I’m so old as to think that if you don’t have an all-analog signal chain from your two-turntables-and-a-microphone to the transmitter, as well as a genuine teletype machine down the hall spooling out the news headlines to read during mike breaks, you’re not really doing “real radio.”
I’d say -ito/-ita means in this context “smile when you say that.” It takes the sting out of many possibly offending words, like viejo or gordo or bajo, and turns them into neutral descriptors.
@Y
I am surprised that bajito is non-derogatory. Do you know anyone who calls himself that? Do you mean bajito/viejito can be used affectionately?
“Cholo si, chino no“
I’ve learned to use bajito to describe someone as short, in a purposefully non-derogatory way, and viejito to describe someone as old where viejo would be rudely blunt. It’s not quite even affectionate, just factual, though in a familiar, informal way.
I hope some Spanish speakers here can elaborate.
Cholo (subculture)
I ran across that last year.
bajito
In Kusaal, adjectives are only allowed as noun-phrase heads in very restricted circumstances, and even then only a few adjectives can be so used. Normally you supply as a dummy head either nin “person” or bʋn “thing”, as in e.g. ninsʋŋ “good person”, bʋnsʋŋ “good thing”, or in the neologism ninsabilis “Africans” (“black people.”)
So you’d say ningiŋ for “short person”; if you say bʋngiŋ (which you might) you are attempting humour: “shortarse”, basically.
However, bʋnkʋdʋg is the normal, not-trying-to-be-funny-at-all, word for “old man.”
I have no idea why this is so.
(“Old woman” is pu’anya’aŋ, which as far as the literal meaning of its components goes, should mean “female woman.” Language is strange.)
I’ve found things like the explanation below in a number of non-academic sites. I can’t vouch for their accuracy.
“ This changed when the Spanish arrived to colonize South America. The Catholic Church insisted upon deciding what was right or wrong to wear among the indigenous population and many of their customs and traditions were disallowed, including their typical clothing. Thus, as of the 16th Century, the Spanish imposed a new style of dress upon the indigenous and mestizo (mixed race) population forcing them to wear the typical European clothing of the era, permitting just a few adaptations to local customs and climate. This is the Bolivian clothing you see “cholas” wearing in the Bolivian Andean highland region today. You can see this in the photos above and below.
The word “chola” stems from the word “chula”. In Spain bullfighters had assistants called “chulos” and their wives were called “chulas”. They wore long pleated skirts, a lacey or embroidered blouse, a shawl and booties. Clothing used by other Spanish women was similar with long, pleated skirts, with a ‘miriñaque’ (bustle) underneath to hold up the heavy cape, a wide-brimmed hat adorned with a feather, and leather boots that covered their legs all the way up to the middle of the thigh. All of this was copied by the indigenous population, and over time, they adopted these as their own typical Bolivian clothes, and still wear them today. …”
source: https://www.boliviabella.com/bolivian-clothing.html
The -ito suffixing seems like it might be roughly analogous to English softening comparatives and/or additional adjectival suffixes (-ish, -ly). The example that springs most clearly to mind is how much more polite it seems to refer to someone as “elderly and shortish” rather than “old and short”.
I don’t find “online radio show” an acceptable term for something with a video feed. But maybe others differ.
We get quite a bit of “online radio” in NZ — originally started by a well-known TV current affairs broadcaster who found himself ‘downsized’.
Part of the whole point of doing radio is that you don’t need to worry about wardrobe/hair/makeup before going on the air! That said, there’s been blurring and crossover in recent-ish years. …
For current affairs, often a picture (or a map) is worth a thousand words. For me, the main advantage is you get actually 60 minutes of information; not 20 mins of adverts with (seemingly) a need to recap after each ad break so you get less than 30 mins information.
I agree it’s unfortunate for broadcasters describable as “having a good face for radio” — particularly if they’ve worked up their radio voice to evoke the pictures anyway. I can listen to the feed whilst doing something else, and glance at the pictures/charts from time to time.
trying to preserve Quechua language and culture
Do they have any view on whether cumar/comal is part of their Quechua?
I’ve learned to use bajito to describe someone as short, in a purposefully non-derogatory way, and viejito to describe someone as old where viejo would be rudely blunt. It’s not quite even affectionate, just factual, though in a familiar, informal way.
I hope some Spanish speakers here can elaborate.
it all possible depending on context, tone of voice, …
viejo can be roughly equivalent to colloquial old man, meaning father, also as a friendly address, viejito adds endearment. Neither is necessarily derogatory. .
In general diminutives ito, ico, illo tend to add affectionate color but might be belittling on occasion
Here is Joan Coromines (1980) Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana, vol. 2, p. 406, on the etymology of cholo (in a note under chulo ‘cute; pretty; cocky’, itself originally 16th-early 17th century argot, ‘boy’):
There is a more recent treatment of this word in José Antonio Salas García (2008) “Peruanismos de origen mochica”, Boletín de la Academia Peruana de la Lengua 45, p. 31–58. He advocates an etymology from Mochica. I have reproduced the discussion in his article at length because the publication is not immediately accessible. Apologies for any uncaught OCR errors:
There is discussion of Salas’ article in the blogpost here, with some consideration of the etymology from Aymara.
Wow, thanks very much for that!
I hope this isn’t too obvious to mention: K’ancha is spelled with an apostrophe because it’s an ejective k. (Or should that be glottalized? I’m not clear on which is correct.) The ch is pronounced the same as in Spanish and English. On her Youtube channel, K’ancha has some pronunciation videos demonstrating the distinction of unaspirated, aspirated, and ejective stops in Quechua.
Those are just real-time podcasts, say I!
Rather, a podcast is a recorded radio program that didn’t happen to have been broadcast. The etymology iPod + (broad)cast supports this.
The latest edition of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy offers an Italian origin for Spanish chulo:
chulo < Italian ciullo 'boy' = shortening of Italian fanciullo.
https://dle.rae.es/chulo
That makes so much sense I’m amazed it hasn’t surfaced before (or, if it has, been more accepted).
an ejective k. (Or should that be glottalized? I’m not clear on which is correct.)
Glottalized is a more general term. An ejective is a glottalized stop.
@hat
The word fanciullo is etymologically the same as a Castilian *infantecillo and might be recognisable, so that a speaker would not seize on the diminutive and use it as a substitute for the whole word. The earliest citation in the DRAE corpus including a complete sentence (and the third earliest overall) is a text about travel in Peru. The word chulo is also listed in the Diccionario de Americanismos. I don’t really see why Xerib’s source is overruled by the new etymology.
The word fanciullo is etymologically the same as a Castilian *infantecillo and might be recognisable, so that a speaker would not seize on the diminutive and use it as a substitute for the whole word.
Seriously? A random Spanish speaker, not a linguist, is going to hear “fanciullo” and think “Ah, that’s obviously my (nonexistent) “infantecillo”? Sorry, doesn’t work for me. And there are plenty of Italian loans in New World Spanish.
I would not describe ciullo as an Italian loan, unless there is an Italian variety which employs it. Maybe GP knows one.
Glottalic consonant article of Wikipedia, with links to “ejective consonant” and “implosive consonant”.
I don’t think so either. A fluent bilingual might figure it out, but hardly anyone else could. Two obvious confounding factors are that the Italian -ci- is pronounced like a Spanish ch, and i ~ u isn’t even a regular correspondence.
I’m amazed it hasn’t surfaced before (or, if it has, been more accepted)
The question I was trying to answer in my comment is whether cholo ‘meztiso; indígena que ha adoptado usos y costumbres urbanos y occidentales’ is the same word as chulo ‘que habla y obra con chulería; lindo, bonito; rufián; etc.’. The passage from Joan Coromines on the etymology of cholo that I quoted at the beginning of my comment is in fact from his article on chulo, which is available on page here, page 405f. Coromines lays out the philological details of the etymology of chulo from Italian ciullo at length. Coromines’ reference to Spitzer ASNSL 141 (1926), p. 264, as an early exposition of this etymology can be found here. (Some sort of attempt to associate Spanish chulo ( > Portuguese) with Italian ciullo goes back at least to Caix in 1878, bottom of the page 102, no. 290.)
@xerib
Thanks. I am sorry for not having looked more for this word. Did not find it in Treccani so gave up 😊.
DM, right, I forgot about implosives.
Corominas is about the best etymological dictionary of any language that I know. It’s very worthwhile turning to if there’s any chance that the word you are looking for might have a Spanish cognate.
It is easy to find ciullo in Italian dictionaries. For example, here:
ciullo
ciùl|lo
s.m., agg.
ca. 1400; da fanciullo con aferesi.
https://dizionario.internazionale.it/parola/ciullo
@Y. “Corominas is about the best etymological dictionary of any language that I know.”
Today, when “Corominas’s dictionary” is mentioned, reference is usually to Corominas 1954-1957 (4 volumes).
Have a look at Corominas-Pascual 1983-1991, which is the six-volume revision, expansion, and consolidation of Corominas 1954-1957 and Corominas 1990 (Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana).
With all due respect to Juan Corominas (= Joan Coromines) and José Antonio Pascual Rodríguez, one must mention the significantly larger Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (with more than 17,000 pages in 25 volumes).