Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [197]
The spread of Quechua
K’ akichanpi millmacháyuj,
nina ráuraj puka runa,
mana õuqaqa atinichu
watuyta chay simiykita.
Imatachus õiwankipas
manapuni yachanichu.*
Red man who blazes like fire
and on the chin raises thick wool,
it is quite impossible for me
to understand your weird language.
I do not know what you are saying to me,
I cannot know in any way.
(An Inca addresses Pizarro, before the battle of Cajamarca)
Atau Wallpaj p’ uchakakuynninpa wankan
The Tragedy of the End of Atawallpa19
Language spread had been a far more complex process in the growth of the other great pre-Columbian empire, the Inca realm known as Tawantinsuyu, ‘Four Portions’. When the Spanish reached Peru, its empire—and its language—covered the whole altiplano to the west of the Andes, from Quito in the north to Talca in the south, linked by a royal road that stretched some 4,000 kilometres, and uniting under one government the Andean and Pacific strips of modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile. The language is known by its speakers as runa simi, ‘human speech’, but there was no accepted term for it when the Spanish arrived: Inca Garcilaso, a well-connected bilingual writing at the end of the sixteenth century, refers to it always as la lengua cortesana de Cuzco, ‘the courtly language of Cuzco’. The first published grammar, by Domingo de Santo Tomás, in 1560, names it, however, la lengua general del Perú, llamada, Quichua, following a tradition that had been attested for at least twenty years,20 and this has stuck. The term qhišwa actually refers to ‘temperate zone’ or ‘valley’, intermediate between the coast and the highlands. The general view at the time was that the temperate zone round Andahuaylas in Apurímac province, south of the city of Cuzco (Qusqu, ‘navel’—the Inca capital), had been the heartland of the language.21
In fact, this seems to have been a later rationalisation.22 Quechua was by origin the language of a coastal region round Lima, with an oracle located at Pachakamaj (’earth-ruler’), the base of a seaborne trading community called the Chincha, who spread their language primarily as a trade jargon out towards the north, particularly up into the northern highlands round Cajamarca and into Ecuador, the area that was to be designated the Chincha-suyu, the most northerly portion of the Inca empire. This all happened in the first millennium AD, long before the Incas were a force to be reckoned with. The grafting of the language on to the growing Inca empire would in fact come almost as an afterthought, by a process rather similar to the adoption of Aramaic by the politic Persian emperor Darius (see Chapter 3, ‘The story in brief: Language leapfrog’, p. 47).
The Inca story began far to the south, on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, where a group speaking the Puquina [pukína] language had established a major centre now known as Tiahuanaco. It seems that in the first millennium, in concert with speakers of Jaqi [háki], another language to the north (the ancestor of modern Aymara, still spoken in Bolivia), they developed an inland trading zone to the north and west; this trade would have spread knowledge of the Aymara language, and its sisters Kawki and Jaqaru (which still survive vestigially south-east of Lima), over much of the area of southern Peru. It is visible in the archaeological record in a distinctive style of pottery, depicting a face surrounded by rays or serpents, which could be the creator god Viracocha. It is, in fact, still possible to find place names that stem from this period, for example Cajamarca itself (Jaqi q’aja marka, ‘town in the valley