Quechua Word Structure
Analysis of Three Sample Texts
with full analysis of the structure of the Quechua words
Text One: Life in
the Peruvian Army
Text Two: The
First Aeroplane Over the Andes
Text Three: Why
Did the Gringos Go to the Moon?
Key to Abbreviations for Suffixes
Introduction: Quechua Word Structure
Cuzco
Quechua builds its (often long) words up in a generally strict order.
Every word
starts with a root (there are no prefixes in Quechua).
After the
root can come a sequence of suffixes …
1. Suffixes
to derive new word meanings
(equivalent to new dictionary entries in European languages).
2. Suffixes
used to add all grammatical
information to relate the main noun and verb words to each other.
3a.
Suffixes (and ‘clitics’) used to determine the type of sentence as a whole, and indicate the source of information for this utterance.
3b.
Suffixes to keep track of topics of the whole conversation, i.e. the between the sequence of multiple sentences.
On these
pages, these types of suffixes are distinguished by colour, as follows.
•
derivational:
with no change of part of speech
– Generally equivalent to deriving new
vocabulary in European languages, but also includes voice (e.g. reflexives,
causatives) and aspect (progressive).
• derivational: with change of part of speech
– To derive new vocabulary with a change of part of speech, i.e. generally verb-to-noun or noun-to-verb.
– The second type especially, i.e. verb-to-noun, is used extensively also in Quechua grammar. What in European languages are usually subordinate clauses with a full verb are structured very differently in Quechua: a derivational suffix is added to the ‘subordinate’ verb to turn it into what is structurally now a noun, and so that noun-based grammatical suffixes can be added to it, and the whole clause becomes a noun phrase.
•
grammatical
(‘inflectional’):
– person: subject or object (direct or indirect) of a verb; possessor of a noun
– number: singular or plural, of verb subject or object; or of a noun
– clusivity: inclusive/exclusive forms of we
– case: on nouns, and verb phrases nominalised using a verb-to-noun derivational suffix
– tense
•
sentence-type (+ focus):
– Type of sentence (statement, question, supposition, order)
– evidential value (indicated by different morpheme);
– focus (by the word this morpheme is attached to).
•
information structure:
– Keeping track of topics of the whole
conversation, introducing new ones and relating them to others: new (in statements or questions); contrastive;
additional.
Three texts are
presented here are taken and adapted from a native Quechua-speaking villager’s
account of his life:
Valderrama
Fernández, Ricardo & Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez (1982)
Gregorio Condori Mamani – Autobiografía
Centro Bartolomé de las Casas: Cuzco,
Peru
The English
translations are a mixture of my own, and my adaptations to those by P. Gelles
and G. Martínez in the English version, alias:
Valderrama
Fernández, Ricardo & Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez (1996)
Andean Lives: Gregorio Condori Mamani & Asunta Quispe Huamán
University of Texas Press: Austin
For
full details and a review of these books, click here.
The spelling of these texts has been amended to
follow the official Quechua alphabet for southern Quechua (Ayacucho,
Cuzco, Puno, Bolivia). Since the
original book was published before the 1985 spelling reform, it was written
with five vowels, appropriate for Spanish but not for Quechua. The reforms in the mid-1980s rectified this,
and the official alphabets in all three main Quechua-speaking Andean countries
(Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) all now use only three vowels <i>, <a> and <u> in the
spelling of native Quechua words. The
letters <e> and <o> are
therefore found in these texts only in Spanish loanwords which have not been
fully assimilated to Quechua pronunciation.
In the Quechua
texts, words in grey are borrowings
from Spanish. The first passage in particular, where
Gregorio relates his time as a press-ganged conscript in the Peruvian Army
(where Spanish was the only language it was permitted to speak), has an even
greater number of loanwords from Spanish than is usual in Quechua. This is largely due to the context of the
Peruvian Army, an institution entirely dominated by Spanish. To give you a bit of a perspective by
comparison with English, words in grey in the English translation of the first text have also been put in bold
if they are ones that English has borrowed from French.
Note too that the
first Quechua passage has a total of just 69 words, while the English
translation has 139: a clear indication
of Quechua’s agglutinating language structure.
To see the
parallel texts here aligned with each other properly, you may need to set the text size on your browser to fairly small.
To jump to the explanation of any particular suffix, just click on it. Then click Back to go back to the text.
Text One: Life in the Peruvian Army
Valderrama Fernández, Ricardo
& Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez (1982:
43-44)
|
Khayna-m |
soldado |
vida |
ka-rqa-n. |
|
soldier |
life |
Such was life as a soldier.
|
Cuartel-pi-qa |
todo |
recto-m |
|
all |
In the barracks everything was strict:
|
«patria |
serve-y |
obedecer |
todo», |
|
fatherland |
serve-inf |
obey |
everything |
“serve fatherland, obey everything”,
|
chay-pi-qa |
mana-m |
ati-ku-n-chu |
«mana-m» |
ni-ku-y-ta. |
|
no-dir |
no-dir |
say-rfxv -inf-acv |
you can’t say no to anything there.
|
Si-chus |
«mana-m» |
ni-nki |
|
say-2 |
If you do say no,
|
u-taq |
mala |
voluntad-wan |
rura-nki, |
|
or-ctv |
bad |
will-itl |
do-2 |
or do something without showing willing,
|
castigo, |
calabozo |
o |
patadas. |
|
punishment |
lock-up |
or |
kicking. |
then punishment, lock-up or a
kicking.
|
Si-chus |
mama-yki |
wañu-chi-na-yki-paq |
kama-chi-su-nki |
|
mother-2 |
If they order you to kill your
mother
|
chay-ta-pas |
rura-na-yki; |
si |
no, |
mana |
patria |
obedece-y-chu. |
|
if |
not, |
not |
fatherland |
then you had to do so; if not,
that was not obeying the fatherland.
|
Cuartel-pi-qa |
ka-lla-n-taq |
abecedario |
mana |
lee-y |
yacha-q-paq |
|
alphabet |
not |
read-inf |
In the barracks there’s also an alphabet for those who don’t know how to
read
|
letra-kuna |
alambre-pi |
ensarta-sqa |
a-b-c-d-j-k-p. |
|
letter-pl |
wire-lcv |
the
letters are wound in wire: a-b-c-d-j-k-p.
The
non-commissioned officers teach the alphabet
and
when you finish, they class you as first year passed.
When
you join up they ask you: “Do you know
how to read?”
And
if you say that you don’t know how to
the
sergeants and the sub-lieutenants
bring
you these letters in order to teach
you.
Text Two: The First Aeroplane
Over the Andes Valderrama Fernández, Ricardo & Carmen Escalante
Gutiérrez (1982: 30-31) One
day during the threshing season, looking
like a condor, shrieking like one of the damned. All
of us working there threshing got scared. what
my uncle Gumercindo once told
(us): that a
few days before the end of this world, they say, a
messenger eagle with a condor’s head and llama
feet will
come and forewarn us runas, the Inca’s kinsfolk, to
be waiting ready for the end of this world. — Inkaríy has been living in the underworld ever
since Pizarro the priest
killed him. he’ll
emerge to join all the runas. So
when the aeroplane
came veering in
our direction,
people said: — It’s
a divine miracle coming towards us. When
I saw that it was truly
veering towards us, I
was thinking, “This must be a divine
miracle ... I’ve always helped my elders work their fields”. Text Three: Why Did the Gringos
Go to the Moon? I
say: if the wounds of this God are
the cause of so much suffering,
for four days of life… Why
don’t we look for him and treat
him? That’s
what I said to my wife years ago, –
That’s why the foreigners
went to the Mother Moon, they say. In
fact, just
in those days, in all the streets there
was talk of how the gringos, travelling
for a week in a plane, All
that sounds like just tall stories
to me though. Key to
Abbreviations for Suffixes www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf