The Phonemes of Native Cuzco Quechua

Paul Proulx
Cornell University

Preface
In the mid 1960's, C.F. Hockett was working on a new model of phonology,
which as far as I know he only reported burried in the middle of a long
theoretical paper on mathematics and language (Hockett 1966:213-220,
222-227). I don't think anyone read it, which is a pity. It's an excellent way
of thinking about phonology. However, I was a graduate student at Cornell at
the time, and consulted with him in my study of Cuzco Quechua phonology.
Hence, the paper I wrote may possibly be the only exemplification of his model,
other than his 1966 one (illustrated by Potawatomi). It is also the starting
point from which I went on to publish a few other papers on Quechua (Proulx
1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974).
One should never reread one's early papers many years later. I
once reread some of my college essays years later, and couldn't believe how
generous my teachers had been in grading them. So today I have resisted the
urge, and send this on to you without a second look, lest I be tempted to
consign it to a well deserved oblivion. For in spite of its likely flaws, it is still a
report on Cuzco Quechua phonology, and does present a somewhat original
view of phonology.
Paul Proulx, April 2003

Cuzco Quechua Phonemes

0. Origins of the paper.
This paper is based on research done in the spring of 1966, when I was a

graduate student at Cornell University. My main source of data was the Cornell
Quechua Language Project Dictionary (hereafter 'the dictionary'), but other

Cuzco Quechua materials were consulted, and problematic forms were checked
with Antonio Cusihuaman (a native speaker from Chinchero, Cuzco).
1. Origins of phonemes.
1.1. The minimal contrastive unit in Cuzco Quechua, as in any language, is

the distinctive feature. In the present analysis, these features are given names
that reflect their position and maner of articulation (other nomenclatures are of
course possible).

The set of all the distinctive features occuring

simultaneously in a phonological segment may be called a feature-defined

phoneme --- as opposed to a classical phoneme set up on the basis of such
things as an undefined phonetic similarity, complementary distribution, and the
like. (In this paper, the feature-defined phoneme will simply be called a
phoneme where clarity of context permits.)
I have heard it said more than once that if the phoneme is not the minimal
contrastive unit in phonology, then 'it does not exist, like the unicorn'. This to
my mind betrays a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the unicorn:
unlike the theoretical phonological entities we set up to explain our data, the
unicorn is itself a datum (occuring or nonoccuring, as the case may be).
Therefore, whether or not unicorns exist is an empirical matter. The distinctive
feature, phoneme, morphophoneme, and the like, on the other hand, are
theoretical constructs like the atom. They may be more or less useful as
descriptive or explanatory devices, but to question their existene is
meaningless.

The analogy between the phoneme and the atom is instructive: both were

originally thought to be the smallest unit of something (respectively speech and

matter), and in both cases it was later found that they were composed of

smaller units still. In both cases they remained useful constructs. However,
while physicists had no problem with retaining the atom, many linguists -

probably responding to the the mood of the 60s, which was to suspect that all
that was inherited from the recent past was hokum if not deliberate deceipt were quick to drop the concept and taboo the word. Of course, they were

mostly right about the hokum we inherited from the 50s, but the phoneme was

one of the babies thrown out with the bath water.

The present paper, then, is aimed chiefly at an improved description of
Cuzco Quechua phonology in terms of phonemes - phonemes defined by their
constituent distinctive features, much as atoms are defined in terms of the

number of protons and neutrons they contain. Such a description begins with
determining which phonological features of a given language are distinctive.
1.2. It seems reasonable to suppose that in preparing to speak in a
particular language, a native speaker moves her tongue and other articulatory
organs into the position from which the least effort is required to reach as
many of the articulatory targets of that language as possible (taking frequency
into account). That is, she wants to be able to produce the more common
phonemes of the language as easily as possible. This preparatory position or
base of articulation varies slightly from language to language, and is largely
responsible for foreign accents.

The base of articulation in a given language

is revealed by intonation carrying hums, hesitation forms, and the like.

The phonemes requiring the least movement in the articulatory organs are
least marked, contain the fewest distinctive features, and historically are highly
stable. Nasals and unrounded vowels are common examples. Those
requiring a variety of motions, such as voiceless rounded postvelar glottalized
stops, are marked, have several features, and are historically less stable. It
seems likely that phonological revolutions, like the Great Vowel Shift of English,
or the 16th century changes in Spanish phonology, are somehow related to
changes in the base of articulation in those languages. It is not clear why such
changes take place, and they are rare.

1.3. Since the Conquest, Spanish has borowed dozens of words from

Quechua, and Quechua hundreds from Spanish. Some of these loans are

ancient and well adapted to the phonology of the borrowing language. Others
are recent and preserve to a greater or lesser extent the phonology of the
donor language.

Some loans have a complex history: ki{wa or ki{uwa 'Quechua' is borrowed

from Spanish quechua 'Quechua' - which in turn seems to be a loan from
Classical (sixteenth century) Quechua qhe{wa 'mountain valley; resident

thereof', otherwise surviving as qheswa.

Since no one seems to have investigated the problem with monolingual

speakers of Cuzco Quechua, it is not clear to what extent Spanish loans may
have modified the phonology of this dialect. In the present study, only the
phonology of words lacking obvious Spanish cognates is described.
2. Cuzco Q. phonemes.
The intonation carrier of Cuzco Quechua is a sequence of open back nasal

vowel plus velar nasal, with the intonation first rising and then falling. The

hesitation form is na, which also functions as a nominal and verbal root, and
whose cannonical form is therefore constrained (roots all end in a vowel). This
constraint puts the nasal at the beginning of the form, where velar nasals are
not found: thus, absence of the feature VELAR in the hesitation form is
grammatically constrained. The order of the two phones also determines
whether the vowel is oral or nasal: vowels are nasal before syllable final nasal
consonants.
Since the sounds in the intonation carrier are not grammatically
constrained, they may be regarded as better clues to the base of articulation
than the hesitation form, where the two disagree. Therefore, the features
VELAR and NASAL are unmarked. VOCALITY will also be considered unmarked,
on the grounds that it comes first in the form not grammaticallly constrained.
The marked distinctive features of Native Cuzco Quechua are:
Lb = labial

Cn = consonant

Al = alveolar

Ob = obstruent

Pl = palatal

St = stop

Lt = lateral

Rt = retracted

As = aspiration

PS = primary stress

SS = secondary stress

RI = rising intonation

EI = even intonation

La = laryngeal

Gl = glottalization

FI = falling intonation

In writing Quechua it is convenient to simplify transcription in the direction

of classical phonemics, using one grapheme for two or more phonetically
similar feature based phonemes provided they are in complementry

distribution. Obviously, biuniqueness is preserved since phonemes and

features are uniquely specified by the graphemes, and vice versa. The
graphemes representing feature defined phonemes are:

Lb Al Pl -- Rt La

{ k

Cn, Or, Ob, St (simple stops)

ph th {h kh qh h

p' t' {' k' q' '

ll

Cn, Or, Ob, St, As (aspirated stops)

Cn, Or, Ob, St, Gl (glottalized stops)

Cn, Or, Ob (fricatives)

Cn, Or, Lt (laterals)

Cn, Or (other oral sonorants)

Cn (nasals)

(None = nasal vowels)

Or (basic vowels)

Rt (retracted nasal vowels)

Or, Rt (retracted vowels)

PS (primary stress = ') or SS (secondary stress = `) and/or one of the

intonation features may be added to any nonconsonantal phoneme.
3. Problems.
There are two earlier studies of Cuzco Quechua phonology (Rowe 1950,
Yokoyama 1951), both of which cover borrowed words used by bilinguals.
However, although these studies are not strictly comparable to the present one,
they differ significantly from each other - and their differences with the present
study are not all due to loans. A discussion of the nontrivial differences
among the studies, and of some problematic forms in the dictionary, follows.
3.1. Stops. Only the first prevocalic stop in a root may be marked
(aspirated or glottalized). This is particularly well illustrated by a few stems
with irregular by-forms: t'astan and last'an 'she squashes something', {'ipun

and sip'un 'she wrinkles something', {hall{an and wall{han 'it makes a boiling
sound', {'ustin and llust'in 'she husks (corn)'. Marked stops are not found in
affixes. One may therefore think of aspiration or glottalization as

suprasegmental features of roots, rather than of individual phonemes - and

their occurrence in loans from Spanish supports this (e.g., althu 'big, high'

from Spanish alto 'high', t'iran 'she uproots, pulls something' from Spanish tira'pull, throw', and hasut'in 'she whips (an animal)' from Spanish azote 'whip').
Marked stops tend to characterize groups of semanticaly related words, as I
have argued elsewhere (Proulx 1972:143), and to spread by semantic
association.

There are some apparent exceptions to this stated distribution. The

dictionary does give some words transcribed with aspirated stops in syllable
final position, in addition to the marked stops provided for above. However,
there are no syllable final glottalized stops, and aspirated stops in this position
appear to be an attempt to transcribe simple stops followed by an optional

transition vocoid at the syllable boundary. In Cusihuaman's speech, I heard

this transition vocoid as schwa-like after a voiced consonant, but devoiced after
voiceless ones - where it sounds like weak aspiration of the preceeding
consonant (qhatqe 'bitter', t'ipqan 'she husks something'). An example of this
kind of weakly aspirated p in a Spanish loan is iwkaliptu 'eucalyptus'.

The voiced vocoid is strongly heard between y and a following q (wayqe

'brother (of a man)'); weaker and often absent between y and m, n, or p
(an{hayna 'thus', {aymanmi 'to that place', suk'aypeqa 'in plowing'), and between
s and q (kasqa 'was').
Other apparent exceptions are reduplicated roots (sa{'asa{'a 'jungle',
akhakhaw 'ouch! (burning oneself)'). {hakhaw, a by-form of the latter, was
rejected by Cusihuaman - as was {'oqho 'whooping cough'. He pronounced the
latter {'oxo and glossed it 'something coughed up'. Lira (1944) has ch'ohho
'coqueluche, tos convulsiva'. Aymara has a verb oqho- 'cough', suggesting
that the Dictionary form of this item may have been recorded from an Aymara/
Quechua bilingual (who blended froms from the two languages).
3.2. Fricatives. Rowe reports a fricative allophone of p in syllable-final

position, not found in the Dictionary nor mentioned by Yokoyama. It differs

from stop p by a distinctive feature, however, and is thus a phoneme.

Historically, it is clear that this phone is produced by the ongoing change

from stop to fricative in syllable final position. This change has evidently run

its course for *q and *{ (now X and s), and, except for some rare survivals, for *t
and *k (now s and x). But it is still underway for *p - where for Cusihuaman
some words were acceptable with both variants (e.g.,llipt'a and llifta 'lime
(mineral)', others admitting only one (e.g., {'aptan 'she pecks (bird)').

It is not

known if other speakers would make the same choices as Cusihuaman, nor

what sociolinguistic or other factors might influence the selection (I found no

phonological explanation).

What IS clear is that a fricative bilabial is unstable in this dialect, commonly

being replaced by a sequence of bilabial plus fricative. Thus, beside {'apra and
{'afra 'bush' there are by-forms {'awxra and even {'awuxra.
There is also a phoneme }, which I found only in the elements ni}u 'too much'

and in -}a- (and its by-form -}ya-) 'progressive aspect'. There is also x in

syllable final position and between two us, and and X in syllable final position

and loss commonly in other positions. In many words, the latter two alternate
with their stop counterparts in syllable final position and with their aspirated
stop counterparts between vowels, but in other words the one or the other is
required.
Thus, for example, we have uxu and ukhu 'inside', axa and aqha 'chicha

(the alcoholic beverage)' - but only uxu 'cough', naxa 'earlier', {'oxo 'something
coughed up', and only laqha 'twilight' and moqhowasa 'hunchback'.1
The utility of transcription based on the recognition of distinctive features
can be seen from these examples: the easily established contrast of stop versus
fricative seen in t versus s is AUTOMATICALLY extended to other positions of
articulation. For example, q versus X is known to be phonemic as soon as
recorded, and no possibility exists of missing the contrast and
underdiferentiating them as do Rowe (with X an alophone of qh) or Yokoyama

(with X an allophone of qh). (This utility is also seen in the treatment of nasals
below.)
The utility of phonemes defined in terms of distinctive features, rather than
working with the features alone, is that they facilitate recognition of the
different treatments of individual phones belonging to a class of phones
according to their position of articulation (e.g., stops in syllable final position).
This is not to say that an organization of data using only features would

necessarily miss this point - just that less attention would be focused on it.
3.3. Nasals and trills. There are 3 nasals before vowels, m, n, and ;
before a consonant, a nasal is generaly homorganic with that consonant. This
gives us a nasal phoneme for each position of articulation, and provides

Note the similarity of uxu 'cough' and Aymara oqho- 'cough'. However, this need not point to
some ancient phonemic correspondence: compare Cuzco Quechua saq'a- 'pull, uproot' from
Spanish saca- 'take out'.

similarly for the morphophonemics of each (they assimilate to a following

consonant's position of articulation). Complementary distribution permits the

nasals to be written with 3 graphemes.
Yokoyama cites one word which violates the above distribution, kinwa

'quinoa (a cereal)'. This word has postdental n, versus the velar nasal before w
generally. However, kinwa has a history analogous to ki{wa, i.e., it was

borrowed into Spanish and back again. Thus, it is not a Native Quechua word
by our definition.
In terms of classical phonemes, there is a single trill r written here with a

single grapheme. However, it is postvelar before a postvelar obstruent, and

postdental elsewhere - giving two feature defined phonemes. Phonetically, it

has an optional fricative offglide in word final position (kurur 'clew').
3.4. Voicing. Three onomatopoetic words (and the poorly assimilated
Spanish loans we are not considering here) would provide a voice distinction:
baba 'the sound of a sheep', bininini 'the sound of a throbbing wound', and
bururururu 'the sound of a bull'.
Generally, stops and spirants are redundantly voiceless - all other phonemes
voiced. However, stops and spirants are often voiced to some extent next to
highly voiced phones (nasals and vowels with primary stress), and unstressed
vowels are sometimes uttered voiceless between voiceless consonants.
Since primary stress is regularly on the penultimate syllable, the
transcription of a voiced k in the Dictionary's hatunkangaray 'how large!' is not

surprising. (Compare Ayacucho Quechua kay{ikankaray of the same meaning.)

The Dictionary also has optional voicing of the q in maqana 'club', just before a
primary stress - and perhaps reflecting influence of the neighboring
Cochabamba dialect, where q is always voiced.
3.5. Vowels. Only 3 vowels are classical phonemes in Native Cuzco
Quechua: a, i, and u. Before and after postvelars (including trills and nasals)
they are retracted (+Rt), and the retracted high vowels are written with the
graphemes e and o. Before a syllable final nasal, vowels lose the feature
(+oral). Before syllable final y, i and a are respectively closed (i) and (e)
phonetically.

4. Distribution.
5. Suprasegmentals.

Works Cited
Hockett, Charles F. 1966. Language, Mathematics, and Linguistics. Current
Trends in Linguistics 3: Theoretical Foundations, 155-304. Ed. Thomas A.
Sebeok. The Hague - Paris: Mouton and Co.

Proulx, Paul. 1969. Proto-Quechua person suffixes. International Journal of

American Linguistics 35.25-27.
Proulx, Paul. 1970. Gramtica del quechua de Huaylas. With A. Escribens.
Lima: San Marcos university press.
Proulx, Paul. 1971. Another y/A correspondence in Quechua. International
Journal of American Linguistics 37.44-45.
Proulx, Paul. 1972. Proto-Quechua *ph. International Journal of American
Linguistics 38.142-145.
Proulx, Paul. 1974. Certain aspirated stops in Quechua. International Journal
of American Linguistics 40.257-262.