Quechua is a very regular language, but a large number of infixes and suffixes change both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning, allowing great expressiveness. It includes grammatical features such as bipersonal conjugation and conjugation dependent on mental state and veracity of knowledge, spatial and temporal relationships, and many cultural factors.
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2 Quechua spelling and pronunciation 3 Links |
A number of Quechua loanwords have entered English via Spanish, including coca, condor, guano, gaucho, jerky, inca, llama, pampa, potato (from papa via patata), puma, quinoa, and vicuņa . The word lagniappe comes from the Quechua word nyap ("something extra") with the article la in front of it, la ņapa, in Spanish.
Quechua Loanwords
Quechua spelling and pronunciation
Vowels
Quechua has only three vowels: /i/, /a/, and /u/, similar to Classical Arabic. These are usually pronounced roughly as in Spanish, however, when the closed vowels /i/ and /u/ appear adjacent to the uvular consonants /q/, /q'/, and /qh/, they are rendered more like [e] and [o] respectively.
| labial | alveolar | palatal | velar | uvular | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosive | p | t | ch | k | q | |
| fricative | f | s | j | h | ||
| nasal | m | n | ņ | |||
| lateral | l | ll | ||||
| trill | r | |||||
| semivowel | w | y |
The consonant inventory seems a bit strange to Indo-European speakers. None of the plosives or fricatives are voiced; voicing is not phonemic in Quechua. However, in many dialects, each plosive has three forms: simple, with glottal stop, and with aspiration. For example:
simple glottal stop aspirated p p' ph t t' th ch ch' chh k k' kh q q' qh