Table Of ContentAYACUCHO QUECHUA GRAMMAR AND DICTIONARY
JANUA LINGUARUM
STUDIA MEMORIAE
NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA
edenda curat
C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD
INDIANA UNIVERSITY
SERIES PRACTICA
82
1969
MOUTON
THE HAGUE • PARIS
AYACUCHO QUECHUA
GRAMMAR
AND DICTIONARY
by
GARY JOHN PARKER
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII
1969
MOUTON
THE HAGUE • PARIS
© Copyright 1969 in The Netherlands.
Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague.
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm,
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 79-85133
Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Charles F. Hockett for his guidance while
acting as Special Committee Chairman during the preparation of this thesis, and to
Professors Frederick Agard, Robert A. Hall Jr., John M. Roberts, and Donald F. Sola
who served as members of this committee.
I am especially grateful to Mr. Alfredo Olarte Mejia who has been my principal
informant throughout the three years that I have studied Ayacucho Quechua.
I also wish to express my appreciation to my colleagues of the Quechua Language
Program of Cornell University for their many suggestions and for the perspective
which they have given me.
Special thanks go to Miss Alicia Ibânez for her aid in typing.
»Iquitos
Cajarnarca
.Huaras \ Huanuco
Huancayo,
« Cuzco
A banca-
Arequipa
Ayacucho Quechua
Other Peruvian Dialects
INTRODUCTION
Ayacucho Quechua is the dialect spoken by approximately one million persons in the
sierra of the south-central Peruvian Departments of Huancavelica, Ayacucho, and
Apurimac (west of Abancay), as identified by Rowe 1950. It is most closely related to
the Cuzco dialect of the Departments of Cuzco, Puno, Arequipa, and Apurimac (east
of Abancay), and to the Bolivian and Argentinian dialects which constitute modern
forms of early (fifteenth century) Cuzco Quechua. Somewhat more distantly related
are the dialects of Colombia, Ecuador, and northern Peru; in the last of these areas
Quechua is nearing extinction, but is still represented by small islands of speakers in
the Departments of Lambayeque, Cajamarca, Amazonas, San Martin, and Loreto.
All the dialects mentioned above, as well as the extinct coastal dialect described by
Santo Tomás in 1560, belong to the major group referred to as Quechua A (Parker
1963) or Quechua 2 (Torero 1965), standing apart from the very different dialect
group (Quechua B; Quechua 1) of the central Peruvian Departments of Junin, Pasco,
Lima, Ancash, and Huánuco.
Latin American publications dealing with Ayacucho Quechua have been largely
limited to collections of texts; see, for example, Lauriault 1955-7 and 1958, Meneses
1954, and Arguedas 1960-1. A noteworthy lexicographical contribution is the sizeable
Spanish-Cuzco-Ayacucho-Junín-Aymara Vocabulario Políglota Incaico (Misioneros...,
1905). Publications of Cornell University's Quechua Language Materials Project,
1963, include a pedagogical grammar with accompanying tapes and a bilingual
Quechua-Spanish Reader.
The present description is strongly oriented toward morphology, with details of the
syntactic functions of forms presented as the forms are introduced, and a summary of
construction, clause, and sentence types constituting the final chapter. The descriptive
framework and terminology employed is basically that of Hockett 1958, and a few
special terms for Quechua are taken from Solá 1958. Terminological innovations are
kept to a minimum, and this has been in large part achieved by avoiding the use of
special descriptive adjectives for individual suffixes.
The author's contact with Ayacucho Quechua began in the summer of 1961 when
the initial research for the above-mentioned Quechua Language Materials Project
publications was carried out in the city of Ayacucho. For the following three years
this work was continued at Cornell.
The principal informant, both in Peru and at Cornell, has been Mr. Alfredo Olarte
Mejia, a student of Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de
8 INTRODUCTION
Huamanga in Ayacucho. Mr. Olarte was born on November 20, 1935. He grew up in
Ayacucho and in Pacaycasa, Province of Huanta, and has traveled extensively through-
out the department.
During the period of initial field research Miss Jesús Ramírez, also a student of
anthropology at Huamanga, dictated to the writer a series of folk tales recorded in her
native district of Puquio, Province of Lucanas. Similar texts from the Province of
Cangallo gathered by and under the direction of Dr. Gabriel Escobar Moscoso, then
of the anthropology faculty of Huamanga, also form part of the corpus of this study.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements 5
Introduction 7
Form-Class Abbreviations 16
1. PHONOLOGY 17
1.1. Suprasegmental Phonemes and Allophones 18
1.11. Stress 18
1.12. Juncture 18
1.13. Terminal Contours 18
1.2. Segmental Allophones 19
1.3. Distribution of Segmental Phonemes 19
2. MORPHOPHONEMICS 21
2.1. Automatic and Free Alternations 21
2.2. Transcription of Vowels 21
2.3. Stem Alternants 22
3. GRAMMATICAL PURVIEW 23
3.1. Parts of Speech 23
3.11. Substantives 23
3.12. Verbs 24
3.13. Ambivalents 24
3.14. Particles 24
3.141. Interjections 24
3.142. Prepositions 24
3.143. Coordinators 25
3.144. Subordinators 25
3.145. Prenumerals 25
3.146. Negators 25
3.147. Assenters and Greetings 25
3.148. Adverbial Particles 25
3.2. Inflectional Categories 26
3.21. Substantive Class Reference 26
3.211. Suffixes 26
3.212. Allomorphs 28
10 TABLE OF CONTENTS
3.22. Number 28
3.23. Case 29
3.24. Gender 29
3.25. Aspect, Tense, and Subordination 29
3.26. Imperative, Injunctive, and Conditional 30
3.3. Derivation and Enclitics 30
3.31. Derivation 31
3.32. Enclitics 32
3.4. Syntax 32
4. SUBSTANTIVE CATEGORIES 33
4.1. Types of Substantives 33
4.11. Nouns 33
4.111. Regular Nouns 33
4.112. Uninfected Adverbial Nouns 33
4.113. Gender Nouns 34
4.114. Nouns always Modified 34
4.12. Adjectives 34
4.121. Regular Adjectives 34
4.122. Uninflected Adverbial Adjectives 34
4.123. Gender Adjectives 34
4.13. Preadjectives 35
4.14. Numerals 35
4.141. General Numerals 35
4.142. Time Numerals 35
4.15. Pronouns 36
4.151. Personal Pronouns 36
4.152. Demonstrative Pronouns 36
4.153. Dependent Pronouns 36
4.16. Interrogative-Indefinites 36
4.161. Pronominal Type 36
4.162. Adverbial Type 37
4.17. /na/ 37
4.18. Multiple-Class Substantives 37
4.2. Substantive Inflection 37
4.21. Allocation 37
4.22. Number 38
4.23. Case 39
4.231. Individual Case Suffixes 39
4.23101. /-ta/ 39
4.23102. /-pi/ 40
4.23103. /-pa/ 40
