The Quingnam language (also misspelled Quignam) was a pre-Columbian language that was spoken by the Chimor people, who lived in the former territories of the Moche culture, an area north of the Chicama Chao River Valley. At the height of the Chimú conquests, the language was spoken extensively from the Jequetepeque River in the north to the Carabayllo River (near present-day Lima) in the south.
Etymology
There are various possible etymologies for the name
Quingnam, which is believed to be an exonym. The first links it to the
Mochica language word king . The name would thus mean , with the assumption of a metaphorical link between spinning and speech. Cerrón-Palomino, however, rejects this as a
False etymology.
Salas García (2010) suggests that quingnam may mean in Quingnam,
Another etymology can be derived from the name of a person named Quin Namo. This person is only mentioned in the Crónica de Ocxaguaman, although the name has a similar structure to other names in the territory of Chimor, specifically in the presence of an element -namo, possibly designating a title of a lord. Perhaps Quin Namo was so important as to serve as the namesake for his language, and many language designations of the Spanish derive from personal names.
History
The Quingnam language became extinct shortly after the arrival of the
. The core Chimú city,
Chan Chan, was in the vicinity of the new Spanish city of Trujillo and became overwhelmed by it, with people needing to pick up the language of the conquerors for trade and survival.
Documentation
It is mentioned that a grammar, dictionary and other documents describing a language spoken in the
Chicama Valley was created by a
Dominican Order friar named Pedro de Aparicio. The language that was described by Aparicio could be either Mochica or Quingnam, but the question is unresolved as these materials have not been found. Works by the Mercedarians Benito de Jarandilla and Bartolomé de Vargas have also been lost, including a grammar by Vargas titled
Arte de la lengua que llaman pescadora. The name of the grammar strongly suggests that it is a description of Quingnam.
A letter found during excavations at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the El Brujo includes a list of decimal numerals which may be Quingnam (Pescadora),
Quingnam and the lengua pescadora
Fishermen along the Chimú coast were reported to have spoken a language called
Lengua Pescadora (fisherman language) by Spanish missionaries, and disambiguated as
Yunga Pescadora by linguists; this may be the same as Quingnam. A report by Antonio de la Calancha indicates that Pescadora and Quingnam were the same language, but Pescadora was more "guttural".
Vocabulary
Numerals
Below are numerals from an early 17th-century manuscript found at Magdalena de Cao (Quilter et al. 2010,
as transcribed by Urban 2019
[Urban, Matthias. 2019. Lost languages of the Peruvian North Coast . Estudios Indiana 12. Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Preußischer Kulturbesitz) & Gebr. Mann Verlag.]). Although the manuscript does not indicate which language the numerals belong to, Quingnam is assumed as it is the most likely candidate based on location and other clues:
>|
! Numeral !! Form |
| chari |
| marian |
| apar |
| tau |
| himic (?) |
| sut (?) |
| canchen |
| mata |
| yucan |
| bencor |
| maribencor chari tayac |
| apar bencor |
| chari pachac |
| mari pachac |
The numerals tau (4), sut (6), canchen (7), and pachac (100) are loanwords from a variety of Quechua II, being tawa, suqta, qanchis, and pachac respectively.
Other words
Antonio de la Calancha gives the etymology of the name Pacatnamu as meaning 'father of all' or 'common father'. Feijoo (1763) gives the word chimo as meaning 'powerful' in Quingnam, though the language had already gone extinct at the time of his writing.
Toponymy
Quingnam toponyms are distinguished from Mochica toponyms by the absence of and the presence of .
See also
