Willem
Adelaar & Simon van de Kerke
Leiden
University,
The Netherlands
It is
highly likely that already before the Spanish conquest Pukina was a language under strong pressure from both
Quechua and Aymara, but it had enough prestige to be
chosen as one of the ‘lenguas generales’. For that reason, religious texts have been
translated in Pukina, which ended up in the
Ore
manuscript from 1607, the only source on the language (Torero 1965, 2002).
Apart
from these texts, we have the Kallawaya language, used
by herb doctors as a secret language. It is a mixed language, based on Pukina lexicon and Quechua morphology. The Kallawayas live(d) in what was
probably one of the last strongholds of the Pukinas in
Bolivia: the
high plateau of the Northern
La Paz
department, an area that overlooks the pie de monte
area where, among other montaña groups, the Lekos live(d).
Apart from some small wordlists, the only relevant source on Leko was a religious text from the beginning of the 19th century. Recent fieldwork has provided us with more data on this dying language. Given the highland-lowland contact that is a general Andean characteristic, contact between Pukina and Leko speaking groups is almost a certainty. Within
in a larger research project that will examine whether these languages have more
in common than some lexical and morphological elements, we started to reanalyze
the Ore
document. In this paper we will report on our latest findings that range from a
strong Quechua bias in the production of the text, Pukina’s supposed genetic link with Arawak, and some reflexions on the
contact between Pukina and Leko. |