Popular – and
Damaging –
Myths About Quechua
Did Quechua Come from the Incas?
Is Cuzco Quechua the ‘Proper’, ‘Best’ or ‘Original’ Quechua?
Where did Quechua Come from Originally? Cuzco?
What Does the City Name Cuzco Mean? Navel?
What Was the ‘Secret Language of the Incas’?
Origins, History and Regional Variation in Quechua
See also the following short articles on my other
webpage on Disputed Issues in Quechua:
The
Name of the Language ‘Quechua’
The
Spelling of the City Name Cuzco (or Cusco, Qosqo, Qusqu…)
This page gives brief answers to these main questions, and links to other webpages if you want more details. For really detailed investigations of the most informed and plausible answers to these questions, we give references to the work of the prolific and widely-respected Peruvian Quechua linguists, Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino and Alfredo Torero. Several of these issues are dealt with by both of them at places in their books Cerrón‑Palomino (2003) and Torero (2002).
Did Quechua Come from the Incas?
The short answer:
definitely, unquestionably, NO! A popular but totally erroneous myth. The Quechua in
For more details on this and related issues, see my links below on the origins, history and regional variation in Quechua.
Is
Again, the short answer: definitely, unquestionably, NO! Another popular but totally erroneous myth. No variety (dialect, accent, etc.) of Quechua is better or worse than any other. What would ‘proper’, ‘best’ or ‘original’ be supposed to mean anyway? Some have more Spanish loanwords and some Spanish influence on their grammar, true, so in this one sense only one might make some arguments. But otherwise no variety of Quechua is particularly more original or native than any other, it’s pretty nonsensical to talk in these terms about languages. All regional forms of Quechua come from the same origin, and all have changed in their own ways since that original Quechua, in different ways in different regions, giving rise to the regional variants we find today. Cuzco Quechua as the ‘purest’? Hardly: it is much more heavily influenced by the other native language Aymara than are other regional varieties of Quechua.
To go to a separate webpage of ours with full details on this issue, click here.
Where
did Quechua Come from Originally?
Where was the original Quechua homeland? That is not known for certain, but all the
evidence points to one thing for certain:
yet again, that it was NOT
To go to a separate webpage of ours with full details on this issue, click here.
What Does the City Name Cuzco Mean? Navel?
There is a very widespread myth, propagated not least by travel guidebook authors (with, one suspects, precious little knowledge of Quechua!) that the name Cuzco means ‘navel’ or ‘belly‑button’, assuming that Cuzco as the capital of the Inca Empire was conceived of as the ‘navel of the Empire’ or even of the universe. This idea is nice and quaint and exotic, but seems to have no basis in linguistic fact. Shame, but there it is.
More details coming later! for now, see:
Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1997) Cuzco y no Cusco ni menos Qosqo
in: Historica vol.21, pp. 166-170
Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1987) Unidad y diferenciación lingüística en el
mundo andino
in: Lexis, vol.11, pp. 72-73
Here’s a brief summary of my views and the above author’s, as I read them.
Various alternative ideas have been proposed, of which the most convincing seems to be the one put forward in the article cited above. This matches three threads:
• One
of the various main legends about the founding of
• the
name
• While now lost from most modern Quechua dialects, there is a word still preserved in at least one remote area which corresponds exactly to the Quechua pronunciation of the city name Cuzco, and which is the name of … a species of big bird.
This seems a fairly plausible trio, though the author himself admits that while it seems more convincing than all the other theories, it’s still far from conclusive proof. You want mystery? You’ve still got mystery...
See also our short explanation on:
The Spelling of the City Name Cuzco (or Cusco, Qosqo,
Qusqu…)
What Was the ‘Secret Language of the Incas’?
In several Spanish documents from after the Conquest, there are references to a ‘secret language’ spoken by the Inca nobility that most people could not understand. It suits the Quechua Academy in Cuzco to claim that this was some more original or perfect form of the language (which they somehow inherited!?!), to reinforce their nonsensical case that they alone speak the perfect, pure Quechua and are therefore in a unique position to decree standards for the language.
Coming eventually will be a few more details of this. It is far more plausible that the ‘secret language’ was no form of Quechua at all, but an entirely different language spoken by the small ‘Inca’ tribe, before they moved to and conquered the Cuzco area, and learnt Quechua from tribes already living there. Their own ‘secret language’ that they kept amongst themselves could well have been none other than … an Aru language (according to Alfredo Torero), alias a form of ‘Aymara’ though importantly by no means exactly the same as the language now spoken from Lake Titicaca southwards into Bolivia. Other candidates have also been proposed, including Puquina and Callahuaya, though Torero’s arguments seem pretty convincing. For details on his views, a first summary is in Torero (2002: 135‑146).
That article continues a somewhat acrimonious debate on the question between Torero and Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino: for his arguments, see:
Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1987)
Unidad
y diferenciación lingüística en el mundo andino
in:
Lexis, vol.11, pp. 72-73
Or there’s also a fuller version also available on the web, El cantar de Inca Yupanqui y la lengua secreta de los Incas, also in Spanish. Try downloading the article at: ftp://ftp.aymara.org/pub/documentos/secret_lang.doc
Origins, History and Regional Variation in Quechua
I now have a separate webpage with full details on this issue: Origins and Diversity of Quechua. The question of where Quechua might have originated is closely bound up – in some way as yet not fully known – with the origins at of the other main surviving indigenous language family of the Andes, Aymara (southern Peru, northern highland Bolivia, and a few villages in the semi‑desert mountains inland from Lima), so you may also want to read Origins and Diversity of Aymara.
These webpages might also be of interest:
• quick summaries on the history and geography and on the origins and history of the Quechua language family
• a brief introduction to the various regional varieties of Quechua, and an indication of how similar/different they are from each other;
• a map of these regional ‘dialects’, of Quechua and their ‘family tree’, showing which are most closely related to which.