Oclusivas complejas en el quechua de Domingo de Santo Tomás

Abstract

Traditionally the Quechua described by Domingo de Santo Tomas in 1560 has been contrasted with Cuzco Quechua due to the absence of an orthographic representation of complex stops and to the presence of postnasal voicing of stops written as , , and . Previously it has not been possible to explain why the author apparently wrote these letters irregularly, sometimes using them but sometimes using , , and . This study shows that this alternation is not irregular, but that the use of versus corresponds regularly to the distinction of simple versus complex stops in modern Quechuan languages that have these sounds, like Cuzco-Bolivian Quechua. This highly statistically significant result suggests that the Quechua described by Santo Tomas did have a contrast between complex and simple consonants, and that allophonic voicing of stops after /n/ was limited to words with simple stops. Taking into account that Colonial Spanish writers took a few generations to be able to write sounds of indigenous American languages that did not exist in Spanish, we can conclude aspirates and ejectives were present in Santo Tomas's Quechua, but that they were not written yet during the 16th Century, only from the beginning of the 17th. This Colonial orthographic evidence pointing to complex stops in a Quechua spoken far from Cuzco indicates that these sounds may be older retentions in the Quechuan languages.