Ecuadorian Quichua

Resumen El Anónimo de Praga es una sucinta gramática manuscrita del quichua ecuatoriano, presuntamente del siglo XVIII. La obra se encuentra citada en la monumental bibliografía de Rivet y Créqui-Montfort y ha recibido hasta ahora tres ediciones. El presente artículo busca rescatar los aspectos destacados de este texto que constituye uno de los documentos fundacionales para el estudio de la variante correspondiente al quichua ecuatoriano. Mediante la revisión del manuscrito y el cotejo con las tres ediciones existentes se analizan los elementos lingüísticos y lexicales que aportan a la comprensión de otros tantos aspectos del quichua ecuatoriano. Se destacarán los elementos divergentes o ausentes en la variante actual, con el fin de enriquecer los esfuerzos de revitalización lingüística que llevan adelante los propios hablantes.

Resumen: Las cláusulas adverbiales, en especial las que integran un sistema de conmutación de la referencia (switch-reference), pueden funcionar más allá de los límites sintácticos y establecer enlaces con el contenido proposicional de la oración precedente. Este tipo de enlaces entre cadenas clausales es conocido como 'enlaces tail-head' (tail-head linkage) (de Vries 2005) o 'construcciones puente' (bridging devices) (Dixon 2009) y ha sido identificado en muchas lenguas de Sudamérica, Oceanía y Europa. Este estudio se centra en la comparación tipológica de los enlaces tail-head en una muestra de lenguas de la rama Chinchay (qiib y qiic) de la familia quechua (Sudamérica). El corpus de las lenguas seleccionadas cuenta con dos tipos principales de construcciones. La primera consiste en una repetición del predicado de la oración anterior en la cláusula dependiente y, la segunda, incluye verbos genéricos de denotación amplia que resumen el contexto precedente. Estas construcciones son un recurso predominante en la organización de las narrativas en estas lenguas y presentan una considerable variación formal y distribucional en el discurso.

Abstract: Adverbial clauses, especially those marked for switch-reference, can function at higher levels than the sentence linking the propositional content of the preceding sentence. This type of connection between clause chains is known as 'tail-head linkage' (de Vries 2005) or 'bridging devices' (Dixon 2009), and was identified in many languages of South America, Oceania and Europe. This study focuses on the typological comparison of tail-head linkage in a sample of Quechua languages-Quechua Chinchay (qiib y qiic)-(South America). The corpus of the selected languages exhibits two main types of constructions: in the first one the verb of the previous sentence is repeated in the dependent clause; the second one includes generic denotation verbs that summarize the previous context. These constructions are a predominant resource in the organization of the narratives in these languages, and present a considerable formal and distributional variation in the discourse. Keywords: Tail-head linkage; Switch-reference; Quechua.

El objetivo de este artículo es dar cuenta de la manera en que a través del YouTube los jóvenes indígenas visibilizan y audializan su lengua. A partir de la observación etnográfica de 200 videos musicales que contienen al menos una parte de la letra en quichua, y de los comentarios que los acompañan, se muestra la valoración sobre la música, los cantantes y la lengua.

This study of Media Lengua examines production differences between mid and high vowels in order to identify the major correlates that distinguish these vowel types. The Media Lengua vowel system is unusual in that it incorporates lexical items originating in Spanish's five-vowel system into a three-vowel system inherited from Quichua, resulting in a high degrees of overlap between the front vs. back, mid and high vowel pairs /e, i/ and /o, u/ in F1xF2 space. As Media Lengua speakers utilize and differentiate between all five vowels despite the large degree of acoustic overlap between mid and high vowels, this raises the question of what other correlates beyond F1 and F2 might be involved. To address this, our study looks at a range of variables, both acoustic and qualitative, in a multi-method approach using both factor analysis for mixed data and linear mixed effects regression modelling. Each method provides a unique view on the correlates of vowel differentiation in Media Lengua. Taken together, our results indicate that Media Lengua speakers rely on both social and linguistic contextual cues to distinguish mid from high vowels, which overlap in acoustic space (F1 & F2).

This chapter examines acoustic data from six speech communities in the northern Andean region of Ecuador to describe allophonic variation in the Spanish rhotics /r, ɾ/ and approximants /ʎ, j/, as well as their relationship to the Quichua fricatives /ʐ, ʒ/. Data were collected from four dialects of Spanish, Imbabura Quichua, and Media Lengua, a mixed language containing Spanish lexicon and Quichua morphosyntax. Results from this preliminary, descriptive survey support claims that speakers of both urban and rural dialects of Spanish make extensive use of [ʐ] (i.e., retroflex fricative) for /r/ and [ʒ] (i.e., postalveolar fricative) for /ʎ/, in addition to a wealth of variation. Similarly, /r/ and /ʎ/ from Spanish borrowings in Media Lengua and Quichua assimilate to [ʐ] and [ʒ], respectively, with little exception.

This article offers an account of Quichua thinking about beauty in the Ecuadorian Amazon: how it is grounded in a philosophical tradition that conceives the world and the self in “perspectivist” and relational terms, and how experiences of beauty play specific roles and attain a particular kind of sense within that context. In particular, we show how indigenous Quichua ideas about beauty inform a range of everyday practices and are intimately connected to distinct ideas about what it means to live a good or mature life. This maturity involves cultivating the self as a body shared with the land, taking on its styles, and responding empathetically to it. But it also means leaving space for others, respecting the boundaries of privacy that emerge through the differentiation of species and the formation of distinct aesthetic communities within particular territories.