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Part of
Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
Edited by Martine Robbeets and Alexander Savelyev
[Not in series 215] 2017
► pp. 25–45

Chapter 2
Proto-Quechua and Proto-Aymara agropastoral terms

Reconstruction and contact patterns

| Leiden University Centre for Linguistics,
| Leiden University Centre for Linguistics,
This chapter presents reconstructed Proto-Quechua and Proto-Aymara lexical items related to cultivation and herding, and draws conclusions about language and subsistence in the ancient Andes. The patterns of lexical borrowing between the two lineages offer a novel empirical perspective on how early Quechuan and Aymaran speakers lived. When the many layers of borrowing are stripped away, it is clear that both were engaged in agropastoral economies before the languages first came into contact. Furthermore, the presence of terms from a wide range of ecological zones, from the high grasslands to (in the case of Quechua) the tropical lowlands, suggests that both languages cross-cut elevations in a manner consistent with the typically Andean system of ecological complementarity.
Keywords: Quechua, Aymara, Andes, agropastoralism, language contact
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Quechua-Aymara relationship
    • 2.1Pre-Proto-Quechua and Pre-Proto-Aymara
  • 3.Agricultural and pastoral terminology in the early Quechuan and Aymaran lineages
    • 3.1The innovative character of some Proto-Quechua agropastoral terms
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 21 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.215.02eml
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