LANGUAGE FEATURES

Given the scarcity of sources, the syntactic, morphological, and phonetical-phonemic features of Culle are difficult to study in a systematic way. The lexical items collected in the historical sources mentioned above have been key for some useful generalizations regarding its linguistic features. The Spanish spoken in Culle’s vernacular area also incorporates a number of indigenous characteristics, both in the lexicon and in some emotion-driven suffixes like augmentatives and diminutives. Likewise, scholarly research has been able to map out a hypothetical Culle area based on the consistency and frequency of its toponymic segments (Adelaar 1990; Torero 2002). In this section, we will address these three areas of research.

The two-word lists yield some 50 words, four noun phrases with core and modifier, and two descriptive statements; one of the latter, “qui amberto gauallpe” (‘I want to eat a hen’), contains the possible first-person pronoun “qui”, ki. The noun phrases indicate that Culle word order was modifier-core, like Quechua, Aymara, and English, and unlike Spanish. Thus, we have “ahhi ogoll” ‘male child’ and “usu ogoll” ‘female child’, where “ogoll” ‘child’ is the core of the phrase. Culle toponyms also follow this order. For example, Conchucos (con- meaning ‘water and -chuco, ‘land’) is interpreted as “wetland, marshy land” (Adelaar 1990: 91), and Ushunday (ushun– meaning ‘bumblebee and –day ‘hill’) is understood as ‘bumblebee hill’. In the eighteenth-century list, verbs are marked with a final segment <u>, which suggests an infinitive marker (/u/ or /w/; Adelaar and Muysken, 2004, p. 402). However, based on a comparison with other languages in the list, Torero (2002: 210) asserts that it could be a different verbal marker, like the first-person one.

Culle toponymy also reveals a number of phonetical-phonemic features of the ancient language. For example, it provides evidence of the frequency of a voiceless palatal fricative (/ʃ/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet) in geographic names like Shiracmaca, Shorey and Pashash. It also brings forth the possibility of phoneme combinations at the syllable boundary that are unknown in other Andean languages: for example, shg, as in Ipashgón; rb, as in Querquerball; and kd, as in Ichocda (Adelaar 1990: 92). Another notable feature is the possibility of having the phonemes ll and ñ in absolute final position, as in Quisuarball and Querquerball, for the former, and Acogoñ, for the latter (Adelaar 1990: 92). Adelaar (1990) notes that this feature is dialectally restricted to the southern area of the Culle region.

The latter characteristic is also observed in the lexicon of this indigenous language, both in historical sources (“ogoll” for ‘child’) and in the indigenous loan words that persist in the local Spanish dialect to this day. For example, maichill is the name of the seeds that are strung together and tied to the calves of traditional dancers, which produce a unique sound; another instance is cushall, which means both ‘light broth’ and ‘breakfast’.

The region’s Spanish is also influenced by Culle in its morpheme inventory, particularly in regards to evaluative suffixes like augmentatives and diminutives. Thus, we have the augmentative -enque, as in cholenque, ‘big boy’, and chinenque, ‘big girl’, and the diminutive -ash- as in cholasho, ‘little boy’, and chinasha, ‘little girl’. The latter has at times been mistaken for the Quechua diminutive -cha (as in niñucha, ‘little kid’) (Caravedo 1992; Calvo 2017), an example of the process of minoritization of the region’s indigenous language even in the academic sphere, due to the greater emphasis on and prestige of Quechua.

A number of specialized cultural fields have also been important in the study of indigenous linguistic legacy in the region. In particular, the field of traditional textile production, where several words and terms naming tools and instruments associated with the backstrap loom have been found to recur throughout the region (see Image 3). Although not all those words and terms can be attributed to Culle, the entire set of names is distinct from those used in other regions of the Andes, even though the techniques and instruments are essentially the same. Other areas of traditional culture require further research, as will be detailed in the next section.