Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

mana õuqaqa atinichu

watuyta chay simiykita.

Imatachus õiwankipas

manapuni yachanichu. [107]

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 Atawallpa [534]

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, [535]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. [536]

In fact, this seems to have been a later rationalisation. [537]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’).

The Tiahuanaco rulers, apparently finding their old home threatened by mud slides, then moved across or round Lake Titicaca, to set up a new base of command in Cuzco: this began the ascent of the Inca, immortalised in their mythology as the career of their first king, Manco Capac, who emerged from the lake, bearing a golden sceptre that would show where they should settle. (Only at Cuzco could it be plunged straight into the ground.) He came with his wife Mama Ocllo, and together (but respectively) they taught men and women the arts of civilisation. At this point, the Incas accepted Aymara de facto as the language of their kingdom, preserving Puquina as an elite language for court use. (Of course, it continued to be used by their ‘poor relations’, left behind south of Lake Titicaca.) Cuzco must have been a bilingual city. This situation did not change for some nine generations (from the Incas Manco Capac to Pachacutec), as the realm of the Incas was expanded east, south and finally northward.

Then, in the time of Inca Pachacutec, serious aggression began. Expansion northward brought the Inca domains into conflict with the Chincha: but the solution found was peaceable and extremely positive. Pachacutec (already married to his own sister) offered his son, the formidable Tupac Yupanqui, in marriage to a Chincha princess, and the result was a merging of the Inca and Chincha domains. This led to a switch of imperial language, from Aymara to Quechua, presumably reflecting a judgement on which was more widespread and useful in the combined Inca and Chincha domains. For a time, Cuzco became a trilingual city. This would have been much less than a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in 1528. Cuzco Quechua, for all its political importance, was still seen as a substandard variety, which interpreters from the north liked to look down on. The new language was then projected with the sudden, and extremely warlike, advances of the empire which, under Tupac Yupanqui, took it northward to Quito, incorporating the significant Chimú state on the way, and southward into Chile.

Father Blas Valera insists on the explicit language acculturation policies pursued by the Incas within their domains.

It remains to say something of the lengua general of the natives of Peru, which although it is true that each province has its own language different from the others, there is one universal one that they call Cuzco, which in the time of the Inca kings was used from Quito to the kingdom of Chile and the kingdom of Tucuman, and now the chieftains use it and the Indians who the Spaniards hold as servants and to administer business. The Inca kings, from antiquity, as soon as they subjected any kingdom or province, would … order their vassals to learn the courtly language of Cuzco and to teach it to their children. And to make sure that this command was not vain, they would give them Indians native to Cuzco to teach them the language and the customs of the court. To whom, in such provinces and villages, they would give houses, lands and estates so that, naturalizing themselves there, they should become perpetual teachers and their children after them. And the Inca governors preferred in the offices of the state, in peace as in war, those who best spoke the lengua general. On these terms, the Incas ruled and governed their whole empire in peace and quiet, and the vassals of various nations were like brothers, because all of them spoke one language… [538]

And Inca Garcilaso adds:

Those kings also sent the heirs of the lords of the vassals to be educated at the court and reside there until they came into their inheritance, to have them well taught and to accustom themselves to the condition and customs of the Incas, treating them kindly, so that afterwards, on the strength of their past communion and familiarity they should love them and serve them with affection: they called them mítmac , because they were newcomers… This injunction made it easier for the lengua general to be learnt with more enjoyment and less effort and grief … Whenever they returned to their lands they took something they had learnt of the courtly language, and spoke it with such pride among their own people, as the language of people they felt to be divine, that they caused such envy that the rest would desire and strive to learn it … In this manner, with sweetness and ease, without the particular effort of schoolmasters, they learnt and spoke the lengua general of Cuzco in the domain of little less than 1,300 leagues’ [4,000 kilometres] extent which those kings had won. [539]