The criollos or whites (15% of the population) are on the top; the mestizos or mixed-blood people are in the middle (37%); the Indians (45%) are on the bottom. Paul Heggarty's pages on Quechua, including grammatical and cultural information and learning aids: a great resource, SIL Ethnologue classification of Quechua dialects, Avi Tuschman's on-line lexicon of E English - Quechua dictionary online at Glosbe, free. The best-known form of Quechua is that spoken in Cuzco (Qosqo), in southern Peru and east to Bolivia. The pronunciation of q varies widely by dialect; in Cuzco it's a post-velar stop (like Arabic /q/) except at the end of a syllable, where it's fricativized; in Ecuador and San Martín it becomes [k]; in Junín it's lost at the beginning of a word, and becomes a glottal stop [?] The chief problem is that the similarity (lexical and phonological) is most pronounced between Cuzco Quechua and its neighbor Aymara; other dialects of Quechua, and Aymara's relative Jaqaru, are less obviously related. The Incas also did not lay down before the Spanish quite as docilely as we are taught in school. However, as objects are explicitly marked, word order is fairly free. Distinctive forms of Quechua are found in the north of Peru (Cajamarca, San Martín, Loreto) and in Ecuador, where it is known as Quichua. (The Quechua refer to themselves as Runa, 'the people'.) One can see not only translation Even kay 'to be' is regular. One of the most interesting features of Quechua is what we might call 'attitude particles'. By contrast the Indo-European languages are inflecting languages. It makes our dictionary English Quechua real, as it is created by native speakers people, that uses language for every day. There's no gender (as in Spanish or French) and no articles (i.e. These are not normally mutually intelligible. The dissemination of the Quechua language has led to the disappearance of almost all the languages originating in the Andean region. During the war, the pishtakus were associated with Sendero's guerrillas, or sometimes with the army-- twin sets of outsiders, coming into Quechua territory to make demands and to enact brutal crimes; only a word depicting a sort of demon predator could convey the appropriate tone of horror. Update, April 2: … The Central Quechua dialects, spoken in the central Andean spine of Peru, are the most diverse among themselves; this leads some linguists to suppose that this area, and not the Inca capital Cuzco, is the ancient homeland of the Quechua peoples. Part of that is because of the way Quechua was used in the 16th century. The northern dialects distinguish between two types of s and two types of ch (the phonetic details vary by dialect). Early colonial sources show such a distinction made in Cuzco dialect as well, indicating that the distinction dates back to the earliest forms of Quechua, and has been lost in the southern dialects. In addition to the direct object marker -ta-, there's also a topic suffix, -qa- (like Japanese wa). Glosbe dictionaries are unique. Browse 6,733 phrases and 127,166 ready translation memories. The singer Yma Sumac has a Quechua name-- ima sumaq means 'how beautiful!'. However, there is much to admire about Quechua culture. 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