Traces of a Lost Language Discovered in Peru - Video and News

Lost language unearthed in a letter found in Peru.

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Proto-Quechua Mind Map

Graphic organizers are visual representations of knowledge, concepts or ideas.
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Proto-Quechua Mind Map

Quechua Language - Index

The official language of the Inca empire was Quechua, although hundreds of local languages and dialects of Quechua were spoken. The Quechua name for the empire was Tawantinsuyu.
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Quechua Language - Index

Spellcheck Wednesday: It's a credibility thing, Enders

Spelling mistakes happen (hey, my keyboard dyslexia should be clear by now to regulars), but you kinda expect serious media outlets to make the effort and spell things correctly. Down on this side of the Darien Gap the classic offence is to spell Colombia with a 'U', making it out to be a university in the USA or part of a regional name in Canada. Here's an example with thousands more available. Typos of South American things can sometimes be put down to genuine mistakes. Here's an example from Reuters today with "La Oyoya" instead of the correct 'Oroya' (though admittedly they get the word right one line later). These are the ones that you shrug and go "yeah well, errar humanum est" and you know that when they correct, Reuters are straight with you and will mention in the leader that a correction has been made.

However there are others that speak volumes. For example, our old blue-eyed whitey pal John Enders is talking nonsense in The Miami Herald again today. Reader 'James' sent in this link to Enders' latest ball of crud published yesterday. James also said in his mail that;

Enders strikes again, this time with serious mis-representations about the new Bolivian constitution, community justice, conditions for modifying the constitution and Evo's re-election.

Well said James, but it is telling how Enders' bigoted attempts to sound like an authority on the region get blown asunder as he can't even spell the word "Quechua" correctly. Here's the excerpt from Ender's copy:

"...government's public administration school would begin training bureaucrats to speak Aymara, Quetchua and Guarani...."

The clear disrespect towards indigenous continues with his incorrect spelling of Guaraní (for those with an eye for accents). This guy cares so much about slagging down Evo Morales, but when it comes to anything approaching a fact on those strange brown people that surround him at every turn (bar of course his idea of the promised land, downtown Santa Cruz) he just shows himself for what he is; a dumbass.

A good reporter tells people facts and lays off his own prejudices. John Enders cannot do either of these. Pathetic work from a country that, due to the likes of John Enders, suffers from a near-complete lack of English language accounts on the reality of matters.

UPDATE: El Duderino rips the Enders piece to shreds right here.

Lessons in Quechua

We've seen Hilaria Supa in IKN previously, when this post tracked the racist attitude of blue-eyed whitey Lima establishment towards the congresswoman for the Cusco region.

Today the upholders of Peru's institutionalized racism are on her back again, as recently she apparently used the following words to describe APRA (the Twobreakfasts party) members in the Chamber of Congress (a great chance to add to your Quechua vocab coming up right now);

• Aras (outsiders)
• Suacuna (thieves)
• Leqles (snotty)
• Maqllas cuna (tight-fisted, bad, broken)
• Maqlla Runa (bad people)
• Maula (donkey, brute, stupid)
• Suha (thief)
• Suhacha (petty thief)
• Supaypa Wawan (children of the devil)

Apparently the APRA congress members want Hilaria Supa investigated by the congressional ethics committee. I can only guess they feel the need to examine how she manages to tell the truth and want to emulate her for once in their pathetic, two-faced, self-serving lives.

Institutionalized Racism in Peru: The Case of Hilaria Supa

Any of you out there speak a 2nd language? I do, and as a matter of fact even if I say so myself my autodidact Spanish, after all these years, isn't bad at all. However I'm the first to recognize that when it comes down to writing in Spanish I still make a whole heap of grammatical errors. This is pretty normal stuff, I'd guess, for the majority of second-language speakers that haven't rigorously studied the language in question.

However, it doesn't make me the object of ridicule. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the case of national congresswoman, indigenous rights defender and all round impressive person Hilaria Supa. This week Supa has been subjected to a humiliating and disgusting racist attack by a Peruvian national daily newspaper. Here's the offending front page of El Correo (truly offending)....


....that throws sarcastic remarks at Supa because after the El Correo photographer took a candid shot of the notes she was making in parliament the newspaper took gleeful delight in pointing out all her spelling and grammatical errors as written. Among the barbs in the cowardly and un-bylined report, Correo told her to go take spelling lessons, said she wasn't fit to be a congresswoman and compared her unfavourably to an eight year old girl.

So let's make this perfectly clear from now on: El Correo is a right wing rag that has a long history of racist attacks, but this one is worse than most. And be 100% crystal clear that this front page would never have happened if this congresswoman representing Cusco wasn't indigenous, whatever El Correo and its readership might say otherwise. No matter that Spanish is Supa's second language, in the screwed up racist world of the white criollo Peru establishment the woman is dumb if she can't write clean Spanish script (she speaks Spanish perfectly, by the way). Also, check out the extract from her wikipedia page to get an idea of the quality of this person. This is just the English language page I'm pasting here, the Spanish one being far more detailed:

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Hilaria Supa Huamán (born in the community of Wayllaqocha, Anta, Cusco region, in 1957), is a human rights activist, an active member of several indigenous women organizations and a Peruvian politician. She is currently a Congresswoman representing Cusco for the period 2006-2011, and belongs to the Union for Peru party.

Hilaria Supa was raised by the parents of her mother, Helena Huamán, who were peasants in a hacienda.

In her childhood she saw the hacendado mistreat her grandfather and violate women, which had a crucial impact on her life. Her grandfather, who fought for peasants' rights, was murdered in 1965. She had to go to Arequipa, and when she returned she found that her grandmother had also died.

Her partner, the father of her children, died in an accident when she was 22.

Afterwards she worked as a house maid in Cusco, Arequipa, and Lima.

In the 1960s she became involved in organizing regular meals for children, together with other women. She became leader of the Micaela Bastidas Committee in Anta, Cusco and took part in the fights for land rights, which finally resulted in the agricultural reform under Juan Velasco Alvarado.

In 1991 she became organization secretary of the new founded Women's Federation of Anta (Federación de Mujeres de Anta FEMCA), where she was responsible for alphabetization, traditional medicine and pesticide issues.

Hilaria Supa has taken part in numerous international women's meetings, where she has actively used and promoted her native Quechua language. She has been resolutely lobbying against sterilization of women, accusing the former health minister under Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Aguinaga, of carrying out a population policy resulting in enforced sterilization of 363.000 Peruvian women.

She was elected to the Peruvian Congress in 2006, where she was the first parliamentarian in Peruvian history to take the oath in an indigenous language, Quechua, followed by her fellow congresswoman María Sumire, for which both were sharply criticized by Martha Hildebrandt and some other members of congress.

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That, I'm sure you'll agree, is one remarkable woman. Did you see that last line, by the way? Worth reflecting on the racism that's institutionalized at even the highest, lawmaking level in Peru because if they do it in congress everyone else will think they can get away with it. Read it again, as it says that Supa was criticized for taking her oath in Quechua by white-skinned Lima politicos, even though it's her first language (and will mean more to her and the people of Cusco she represents) and even though Quechua is one of the two official languages of Peru.

Stomach-churning racism happens all the time in Peru. This is the country where indigenous get jeered at for proudly wearing their traditional garb. This is the country where doormen at swanky clubs and restaurants will not let dark-skinned people in because they don't want to "lower the tone". Even well-meaning people are profoundly racist. More than once on trips to Lima I've found myself talking about my 100% indigenous blood wife and our two kids and heard the question, "But are they white like you?". I shit thee not.

But my favourite recent story that highlights just how discriminatory Peru really is concerns letting maids into restaurants at lunchtime. In Lima it's typical for the middle class family to have a (often indigenous blood) nanny to help out with the young kids, but recently there have been protests from some quarters about how the maids are not let into restaurants with the rest of the family. So rather than order restaurants etc to serve one and all whatever their position, the Peruvian gov't made it illegal for maids to be seen in public wearing their in-house uniforms. Y'see, in the warped view of Peru's legislature, if these people are suddenly invisible they're not so likely to clutter up the place. Who gives a damn if you're wearing a uniform or not!!??!!? What kind of mad government thinks you can hide racism behind a set of clothes?

Fortunately, there are pockets of enlightened people in the country trying to do something about the all-pervading racist attitudes in Peru, for example the blog Choledad Privada (great blog name by the way...smart play on words) is a beacon of sanity and there are others of the same ilk. But to repeat, if racism is part of daily life and indigenous heroes such as Sula are attacked in the most disgusting ways by Peru's mainstream media and government, the intelligent Peruvian is swimming against a very strong tide.

Deserved hat tips to Sheput and Reportaje al Peru, two Peruvian bloggers that care enough to shout "racist Correo" at the tops of their voices. Kudos.

Pachakuti

I've mentioned this word before, and as a reminder it's the Quechua word (the language of the Inca people, still widely spoken in the Andean region) which reasonably translates as "Upside Down World."

Pachakuti came to mind today when I saw the front cover of Argentina's best daily, "Critica de la Argentina". Today's headline is "Upside Down World" , and along with being printed upside down (just for the laugh, I suppose) makes a list of the financial weirdness going on right now, including that little detail about how 1/10th of the money being thrown at the banking system would be enough to rid the world of hunger. Yes, I know it's simplistic.....but all the same....y'know..... ?

A little more background on the word Pachakuti: According to the keepers of Quechua tradition, namely the Q'eros people who live in remote villages high up in the mountains in the Cuzco region of Peru, the world was turned upside down by the arrival of Pizarro&Co in the 16th Century. As a quick sidebar, I'm told translations from Quechua can always be disputed for idiomatic precision, but the message is the thing to understand. With that said, in the words of the Q'eros, pachakuti is the time that, "What became right became wrong; the logical became illogical, and the unreasonable became reasonable." The word pachakuti is also correctly translated as "the great return". So if you can grasp the concept of translating a single word as "upside down world" and "the great return" at the same time, and then look back at that little Q'eros description and note why the word was coined in the first place, you can begin to see where it's coming from.

Legend states that Pachakuti would continue until this era; spookily, Pachakuti is supposed to have begun its reversion to the norm began in our year 1987 and the process will finish in 2012, at which time the world will be put back to normal. For those of you with a bit of Mayan pop culture, that people (unconnected with the Inca) also predicted their own "end of time" for December 21st to 23rd, 2012 using a very complicated and sophisticated calendar system, which is often erroneously interpreted by us heathens as the Mayans predicting the end of the world, doomsday and all that baggage.

This post isn't about telling you what's going to happen; not at all. All it's about is to give you a bit of background about the way Latin America is looking at the financial crisis (apart from the superficial combo of ridiculing you all up there and fearing for its own short-term future, that is). There is something deeper going on here, people. My only personal observation on this warm and sunny Sunday morning would be to say that for a poor person, becoming poorer doesn't hurt half as much as for a rich person becoming poor. And this is one poor continent.

I'm now going to take my family to a middle-class restaurant and eat something nice and luxurious with them. I don't think there's anything wrong with that as long as you're suitably thankful for the chance of doing it and don't expect it as a fundamental human right. Have a good Sunday, people.