American River Names

[Eduard Selleslagh]

At 04:21 10/04/01 -0500, you wrote:
>If you add Runa and Atmara, spoken in a large area of NW Argentina, the
>number is much larger.

[Ed]
I guess you mean Runa Simi (litterally: Man('s) Language, which is the same
as Quechua, the Inca language, still spoken (at least among themselves) by
over 50% of the 28 million Peruvians) and Aymara, nowadays limited to SE
Peru (Lake Titicaca) and Bolivia and surroundings, but originally spoken as
far north as Cusco and Urubamba (Cusqueño Quechua still shows substratum
signs of Aymara: e.g. the rich variety of aspirated and velar plosives).
I've never met a Quechua or Aymara speaker who wasn't at least bilingual
(Quechua-Spanish; Aymara speakers in Puno are often trilingual
Aymara-Quechua-Spanish) - often with grammatical transpositions in Spanish.
Note that Aymara contains a large nimber of Quechua loanwords (maybe 40%),
due to Inca domination and the obsession of Spanish missionaries (and
others: my Quechua grammar was written by a French speaking Swiss monk
working in Lima as a Quechua teacher for missionaries)  with Quechua (If
you're a native, you're supposed to speak Quechua)

>These areas were the densely populated areas during colonialtimes.
>	Colonial Argentina also had close commerical and political contacts
>with Peru and Bolivia. It was under the Vice-Royalty of Lima and supplied
>horses, mules, dried beef, tallow and hides for the Andean region.
>	Massive immigration from Europe began well after independence and
>while immigrants did contribute to Argentine Spanish, they also continued
>to use the loanwords from indigenous languages.

[Ed]
e.g. the Italian tone and peculiar pronunciations of Porteño (Buenos Aires)
Spanish.

>>Population density did matter in most of the Spanish Empire; note the number
>>of Nahuatl words in Mexican Spanish, as compared to the relative absence of
>>loan-words in, say, Argentina.

>Rick Mc Callister

Ed. Selleslagh