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Quechuan and Aymaran spelling shift

 

 
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Quechuan and Aymaran spelling shift
 
 
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In recent years, the spelling of place names in Peru
Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
 and Bolivia
Bolivia

The Republic of Bolivia , named after Sim?n Bol?var, is a landlocked country in central South America. It is bordered by Brazil on the north and east, Paraguay and Argentina on the south, and Chile and Peru on the west....
 has been revised among Quechua
Quechua

Quechua is a Native American language of South America. It was already widely spoken across the Central Andes long before the time of the Inca Empire, who established it as the official language of administration for their Empire, and is still spoken today in various regional forms by some 10 million people through much of South America, in...
 and Aymara
Aymara language

Aymara is an Aymaran languages language spoken by the Aymara ethnic group of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Indigenous languages of the Americas with over a million speakers....
 speakers. A standardized alphabet for Quechua was adopted by the Peruvian government in 1975; a revision in 1985 moved to a three-vowel orthography.

The major changes are to replace the digraph
Digraph (orthography)

A digraph, bigraph , or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined....
 hu with the single letter w, and to replace the consonants c/q[u] with either k or q, as appropriate in the word in question.






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In recent years, the spelling of place names in Peru
Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
 and Bolivia
Bolivia

The Republic of Bolivia , named after Sim?n Bol?var, is a landlocked country in central South America. It is bordered by Brazil on the north and east, Paraguay and Argentina on the south, and Chile and Peru on the west....
 has been revised among Quechua
Quechua

Quechua is a Native American language of South America. It was already widely spoken across the Central Andes long before the time of the Inca Empire, who established it as the official language of administration for their Empire, and is still spoken today in various regional forms by some 10 million people through much of South America, in...
 and Aymara
Aymara language

Aymara is an Aymaran languages language spoken by the Aymara ethnic group of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Indigenous languages of the Americas with over a million speakers....
 speakers. A standardized alphabet for Quechua was adopted by the Peruvian government in 1975; a revision in 1985 moved to a three-vowel orthography.

The major changes are to replace the digraph
Digraph (orthography)

A digraph, bigraph , or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined....
 hu with the single letter w, and to replace the consonants c/q[u] with either k or q, as appropriate in the word in question. K and q represent different sounds in most Andean languages: k is a velar stop, as in Spanish and English; q is a uvular stop (IPA ). As Spanish does not have uvular /q/, traditional spellings lose this distinction (although sometimes a double cc was used to represent the k-like sounds of Quechua that differed from the "plain k" sound known in Spanish; e.g., in place names such as Ccarhuacc, Chopcca, Cconocc, Llacce, Manyacc, Chihuilluyocc, Chilcahuaycco, etc.), and Quechua or Aymara sources must be consulted to select the right consonant. For instance, the Temple of the Sun
Coricancha

The Coricancha , originally named Inti Kancha was the most important temple in the Inca Empire, dedicated primarily to Inti, the Sun God....
 in Cusco
Cusco

||}Cusco is a city in southeastern Peru, near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cusco Region as well as the Cusco Province....
 is named Qurikancha in Quechua, with both sounds (quri = gold, kancha = courtyard, enclosure), and is spelled Coricancha in Spanish.

Additionally, the phoneme inventory
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
 of Quechua and Aymara includes just three vowels, /a/, /i/, and /u/. Older Spanish transcriptions (as well as the 1975 standard) used the letters o and e as well; this is due to the fact that the pronunciation of /u/ and /i/ opens
Open vowel

An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in most spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth....
 to [] and [] adjacent to a /q/, an instance of allophonic variation
Allophone

In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word....
. For instance, Quechua qucha 'lake' sounds to Spanish speakers like cocha, as in the sample Huiracocha below. Some sources, such as dictionary published by the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, still use the five-vowel 1975 orthography.

In Bolivia and Southern Peru, including Cuzco, there are three versions of all the stop consonants: the basic unaspirated sounds (p, t, ch, k, q), an aspirated
Aspiration (phonetics)

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of Earth's atmosphere that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents....
 series spelled with an h (ph, th, chh, kh, qh); and finally an ejective series spelled with an apostrophe (p', t', ch', k', q). In Aymara
Aymara language

Aymara is an Aymaran languages language spoken by the Aymara ethnic group of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Indigenous languages of the Americas with over a million speakers....
 and Southern Quechua
Southern Quechua

Southern Quechua is an idealized Indigenous peoples of the Americas literary language and literary norm of the Quechua language for its southern varieties, respectively, in Peru and Bolivia....
, these are distinct sounds, making a total of 15 stop consonants, and these differences must be shown in the spelling: in the example words below, the kh in khipu is not the same as the k in Inka or in Tiwanaku; nor is the qh sound at the start of "qhapaq" the same as the q sound at the start of "Qusqu". In most regions north of Cusco, these variants do not exist, and only the basic unaspirated sounds are used.

These changes are considered to be part of a general process of spelling standardisation and reassertion of the right of these native languages to their own spelling system appropriate for their sound systems, which are very different from that of Spanish. This accompanies a growth of pride in the Andean heritage of these countries, and moves to recover the prestige of their indigenous languages. These spelling changes are part of the official alphabets for Quechua and Aymara in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, though debate continues on the extent to which they are to be used when writing in Spanish.

Hispanic spelling Official Modern Spelling Spanish English
cuy/ccuy/ccoy/ccoui quwi cuy/coy guinea pig
Cusco/Cuscco/Ccozcco Qusqu Cuzco/Cusco/Cozco Cuzco
Tiahuanaco/Tiahuanacco Tiwanaku Tihuanaco/Tiahuanaco Tiwanaku
Sacsayhuaman Saksaywaman Sacsayhuaman Sacsayhuaman
Inca Inka Inca Inca
Huayna Capac/Ccapacc Wayna Qhapaq Huayna Capac Huayna Capac
Huiracocha/Huiraccocha Wiraqucha Viracocha/Huiracocha Viracocha
quipu khipu quipu quipu (knotting system)


External links

  • How to write Quechua well.
  • With many more details and integrated sound files to listen to the pronunciations.