Waiting one more day for the camera, which I then got back almost completely unusable, I had the chance to attend a lesson in Quechua, the language of the indigenous Andenean people, spoken in manifold dialect colorations by an estimated number of more than 7 Million people from South of Colombia down to Chile and Argentina. Peru with more than 3 Million speakers is the country with the most widespread use, in some parts it is even official language. I crossed villages, especially in the area of Huancayo to Huaraz, where the people did not understand castellano, but in general this language seems to be threatened with extinction: most of the youth does not speak it, and those few I met learnt it in their childhood from their grandparents. Still in their parent’s generation it was considered inferior to spanish and the recent inclusion into the school curriculum of rural areas was enforced against considerable opposition.
Even if Quechua counts only the three vowels a,i,u, the sound of the language is very smooth and melodious due to the lots of double vowels and -ay phonems: munay huarmi, beautiful woman or ñañay, sister. Their is no flection like in German, but the meaning of words is altered by appending of suffixes: k’an, you, becomes k’ankuna in the plural and chakrachaykuna, my little fields, is obtained by appending –cha (little), –y (my) and –kuna (for plural) to chakra (field). The same is true for verbs: llanq’ay, to work, becomes noq’anchis llanq’anchis, we work. There is a bunch of words in finely shaded meanings related to the semantic fields of home, family and environment, but for other vocabularies up to 30% are overtaken from spanish. Even some German words can be traced back to Quechuan origin, like Kondor, Puma, Pampa etc. Hopefully, people become more confident of their cultural heritage before it is lost forever.
During this time in Cusco, two new articles were published about my journey. You may find the links under the menu bar Presse.
Ashllatawankama!