Empires Of The Word Part 23

The Tiahuanaco rulers, apparently finding their old home threatened by mud slides, then moved across or round Lake t.i.ticaca, to set up a new base of command in Cuzco: this began the ascent of the Inca, immortalised in their mythology as the career of their first king, Manco Capac, who emerged from the lake, bearing a golden sceptre that would show where they should settle. (Only at Cuzco could it be plunged straight into the ground.) He came with his wife Mama Ocllo, and together (but respectively) they taught men and women the arts of civilisation. At this point, the Incas accepted Aymara de facto as the language of their kingdom, preserving Puquina as an elite language for court use. (Of course, it continued to be used by their 'poor relations', left behind south of Lake t.i.ticaca.) Cuzco must have been a bilingual city. This situation did not change for some nine generations (from the Incas Manco Capac to Pachacutec), as the realm of the Incas was expanded east, south and finally northward.

Then, in the time of Inca Pachacutec, serious aggression began. Expansion northward brought the Inca domains into conflict with the Chincha: but the solution found was peaceable and extremely positive. Pachacutec (already married to his own sister) offered his son, the formidable Tupac Yupanqui, in marriage to a Chincha princess, and the result was a merging of the Inca and Chincha domains. This led to a switch of imperial language, from Aymara to Quechua, presumably reflecting a judgement on which was more widespread and useful in the combined Inca and Chincha domains. For a time, Cuzco became a trilingual city. This would have been much less than a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in 1528. Cuzco Quechua, for all its political importance, was still seen as a substandard variety, which interpreters from the north liked to look down on. The new language was then projected with the sudden, and extremely warlike, advances of the empire which, under Tupac Yupanqui, took it northward to Quito, incorporating the significant Chimu state on the way, and southward into Chile.

Father Blas Valera insists on the explicit language acculturation policies pursued by the Incas within their domains.

It remains to say something of the lengua general of the natives of Peru, which although it is true that each province has its own language different from the others, there is one universal one that they call Cuzco, which in the time of the Inca kings was used from Quito to the kingdom of Chile and the kingdom of Tuc.u.man, and now the chieftains use it and the Indians who the Spaniards hold as servants and to administer business. The Inca kings, from antiquity, as soon as they subjected any kingdom or province, would ... order their va.s.sals to learn the courtly language of Cuzco and to teach it to their children. And to make sure that this command was not vain, they would give them Indians native to Cuzco to teach them the language and the customs of the court. To whom, in such provinces and villages, they would give houses, lands and estates so that, naturalizing themselves there, they should become perpetual teachers and their children after them. And the Inca governors preferred in the offices of the state, in peace as in war, those who best spoke the lengua general. On these terms, the Incas ruled and governed their whole empire in peace and quiet, and the va.s.sals of various nations were like brothers, because all of them spoke one language...23 And Inca Garcilaso adds: Those kings also sent the heirs of the lords of the va.s.sals to be educated at the court and reside there until they came into their inheritance, to have them well taught and to accustom themselves to the condition and customs of the Incas, treating them kindly, so that afterwards, on the strength of their past communion and familiarity they should love them and serve them with affection: they called them mitmac, because they were newcomers... This injunction made it easier for the lengua general to be learnt with more enjoyment and less effort and grief ... Whenever they returned to their lands they took something they had learnt of the courtly language, and spoke it with such pride among their own people, as the language of people they felt to be divine, that they caused such envy that the rest would desire and strive to learn it ... In this manner, with sweetness and ease, without the particular effort of schoolmasters, they learnt and spoke the lengua general of Cuzco in the domain of little less than 1,300 leagues' [4,000 kilometres] extent which those kings had won.24 To these apparently benign methods, the Incas had added the harsher one of repopulating some areas with colonies of Quechua-speaking immigrant families, also known as mitmaj, 'transplants'. These were sent with the aim of diluting and pacifying the original population. There were ten to twelve thousand of them, settled with some finesse:25 'They were pa.s.sed to other villages or provinces of the temper and manner of those from which they issued; because if they were from a cold country they were taken to a cold country, and from hot, to hot ... They were given estates in the fields and lands for their labours and a place to make their houses.'26

The spreads of Chibcha, Guarani, Mapudungun

amandu Ru Ete tenondegua

Oamyvyma,

oyvarapy mba' ekuaagui,

okuaararavyma

ayvu rapytara i

oikuaa ojeupe.

mboapy mba' ekuaagui,

okuaararavyma,

ayvu rapyta oguerojera,

ogueroyvara ande Ru.

Yvy oiko' ere,

pytu yma mbytere,

mba'e jekuaa' ere,

ayvu rapytara i oguerojera,

ogueroyvara

amandu Ru Ete tenondegua.

True Father amandu, the First One...

Standing up straight

from the wisdom in his own G.o.dhead

and in virtue of his creating wisdom

conceived the origin of human language

and made it form part of his own G.o.dhead.

Before the earth existed

amidst the primordial darkness

before there was knowledge of things

he created what was to be the foundation of human language

and True First Father amandu

made it form part of his own G.o.dhead.

Ayvu Rapyta, 'The Foundation of Human Language',

Mbya-Guarani creation myth27