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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Zompist has a nice page with small facts about the language; for something a bit deeper Langfocus gives it a rather good introduction. I'll mention some bits but keep in mind that I don't speak it, nor live anywhere close to speakers.
It's mostly associated with the Inca empire. But even after the Spanish conquest of the Andes, the language has 7~10 million speakers; alongside Guarani it's one of the two "big" native languages of South America.
I'm not sure however if I should be calling it "language" or "languages"; there's a bunch of Quechuan varieties, and some might argue that they're related but already distinct languages.
Some years ago some PhD student made into the news for actually defending her PhD thesis in Quechua, instead of shifting it to Spanish.
A few other tidbits of info, applying to most Quechua varieties:
Only three vowels - /a i u/. They're typically pronounced as the ones in "bat", "bit" and "book", but this varies considerably. On the other hand it has quite a bit of consonants, Cusco Quechua for example has 26 (or 30 if counting /f b d g/, from Spanish loanwords).
Words are mostly built from blocks, as in Turkish or Finnish. And just like Finnish it relies quite a bit on suffixes, so they can get quite long. For example, the word for "dog" can be simply allqu (nominative [subject], singular) or something like "allqukunapaq" (benefactive, plural - roughly "for the sake of my dogs"; -kuna- is the plural and -paq the case mark). On the other hand you typically use less words per sentence; for example it barely uses adpositions and particles.
There are different words for we = I+you (inclusive "we") and we = I+someone else (exclusive "we"). Not that you're going to see them a lot; the verb conjugation is usually enough, so pronouns can be dropped entirely.
The evidentials are actually a big deal, and the difference between people taking your bullshit for irony or for you being a liar. If we were to emulate this in English:
...except that I had to use full sentences to do this in English. If English had Quechua-like evidentials you'd simply plop -mi and -chra after "The Moon" and call it a day.