Quechua me if you can!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/06/22 12:36 -07:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/06/22/643179.aspx

Here we go again!

In the fine spirit of previous posts such as We're drowning in LIPs!, Microsoft, you giving us some LIP?, Let there be LIPs, Oops, we did it again, Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ), 'c' is for click sounds, and they're good enough for me, and Persian? or Farsi?, there now is...

the Quechua Language Interface Pack!

(Regular readers may recall that I have mentioned Quechua previously)

Here is some background information about Quechua:

Number of speakers: 10 million speakers

Name in the language itself: Qhichwa Simi

Quechua is the most widely spoken Native American language. Its various dialects are spoken by about 10 million speakers in South America. It is official language of Bolivia and Peru, but also spoken in southern Colombia and Ecuador, north-western Argentina and northern Chile.

Quechua is a very regular agglutinative language, which means that it adds interfixes and suffixes to words in a regular way to change their meaning. Interesting grammatical features include the two distinct forms of "we" (an inclusive one, meaning ""we and you", and an exclusive one, "we without you"), bipersonal conjugation (which means that verbs have to agree with both subject and object), suffixes that express who benefits from an action (-ku makes the actor the recipient of the action, -naku makes the action mutual), and last, not least, the feature of "evidentiality": In Quechua the speaker can express how certain he or she is about the statement, with -mi expressing personal knowledge, -si expressing hearsay knowledge, and -cha expressing probability.

Quechua is essentially an oral language. Many of its speakers are illiterate, and there is still a lack in printed material.

Fun facts:

• Via Spanish a number of Quechua loanwords have entered English: For example, the animals  condor, guano, llama and puma got their names from Quechua as do the coca and quinoa plants. Nobody would think that the word jerky comes from Quechua, but it does: It stems from the term ch'arki, which means "dried meat". 
• Quechua was official language of the Inca empire, which helped spreading the language across the Andes.

Classification:

Quechua belongs to the group of Quechuan languages. No established relationship exists with other language groups inside the vast family of Amerind languages spoken in the Americas, though Quechua has been linked with Aymara.

Script:

Quechua is written in the Latin script which was introduced by the Spanish. There was no alphabet prior to that.

Enjoy!

This post brought to you by Q (U+0051, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q)

# Jared Peless on Thursday, June 22, 2006 9:25 PM:

# Braulio on Thursday, June 22, 2006 11:54 PM:

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