Quingnam (also misspelled Quignam), also called Pescadora (though this name is ambiguous) and Chimú, is an extinct, poorly attested Indigenous language formerly spoken by the Chimú people on the coast of northern Peru. After the Spanish conquest, the language went into decline and was extinct by 1763. It is virtually unknown, with a list of numerals, proper names and a few other scattered words constituting the only data on this language. The language has been historically conflated with Mochica, another extinct language spoken in coastal Peru, but is completely distinct and unrelated to it.
Etymology There are various possible etymologies for the name Quingnam, which is likely an exonym. The first links it to the Mochica word . The name would thus mean , with the assumption of a metaphorical link between spinning and speech. Peruvian linguist Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, however, rejects this as a popular etymology.
José Antonio Salas García suggests that quingnam may mean in Quingnam, but the word for 'fisherman' in locations where Quingnam was spoken is recorded as , or instead.
According to Matthias Urban (2019), another etymology can be derived from the name of a person named Quin Namo. This person is only mentioned in a document called the Crónica de Ocxaguaman. The name has a similar structure to other names in the territory of Chimor, specifically in the presence of an element , possibly designating a title of a lord. Since many other language designations of the Spanish derive from personal names, Urban suggests that Quin Namo could have been so important a figure as to serve as the namesake for his language.
History
Official status Quingnam was reported to be the official language of Chimor, the kingdom ruled by the Chimú, according to chronicler Antonio de la Calancha. Chimor was founded around 900 AD and conquered by and incorporated into the Inca Empire around 1470.
Documentation Ivan Meléndez (1681) mentioned that a grammar, dictionary and other documents describing a language spoken in the Chicama Valley were written by a Dominican friar named Pedro de Aparicio, who arrived there in the 16th century. The language that was described by Aparicio could be either Mochica or Quingnam, but 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 . The name of the grammar strongly suggests that it is a description of Quingnam.
An early 17th-century letter found during excavations in the ruins of a church at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the El Brujo Archaeological Complex includes a list of decimal numerals on the back which are probably Quingnam (Pescadora).
Language contact It is possible that Quingnam, along with Mochica, were in contact with the Cholón language, historically spoken along part of the Marañón River. Speakers of Quingnam may have traded goods, such as salt, with the Cholón people.
Quingnam shares a number of lexical items with other languages of the northern Peruvian coast and elsewhere. Urban (2019) lists four correspondences: possibly Quingnam (?) : Culli , possibly Quingnam (?) : Culli ~ , possibly Quingnam : Colán : Catacao : Mochica : Culli : Yurumanguí , Quingnam : Cuica .
Extinction Quingnam disappeared early in the colonial history of Peru. Toribio de Mogrovejo reported that Quechua was already spoken along portions of the central Peruvian coast in the early 16th century. Spanish had also begun to replace the native languages of the coast; for example, in Guaman in the Moche Valley, residents there already spoke Spanish in 1582. Quingnam is not mentioned in a 1651 document listing languages needed for the "evangelization of the North Coast", nor in Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón's late-18th-century Codex Martínez Compañón, indicating that by then, according to Urban (2019), "it was not considered relevant for the aims of the Spanish". reported that in 1763, Quingnam had already become extinct in favor of Spanish. The exact reason for its extinction is unclear. Spanish religious evangelism contributed to Indigenous language loss throughout Quechua-speaking regions, and in the region of Trujillo, much cultural loss can be attributed to major epidemics which drastically reduced the population. Nevertheless, it would appear as though some knowledge of vocabulary from the Indigenous language of Trujillo persisted past its demise; in 1793, some non-Quechua vocabulary was recorded in a general description of the area by D. José Ignacio de Lecuanda.
Geographical distribution At the height of the Chimú conquests, the language was spoken from the cities of Paita and Tumbes in the north to Paramonga in the south, possibly even further to Carabayllo, though its exact southern limits remain unclear. As of the time of Calancha, Quingnam was spoken in the Trujillo valleys. The northern limits of Quingnam distribution are considered to be in the towns of San Pedro de Lloc and Jequetepeque.
Classification Quingnam is far too poorly attested to be classified linguistically. The numerals found on the Magdalena de Cao letter do not correspond to their equivalents in Mochica, indicating that the language of the letter and Mochica were distinct and unrelated languages. Urban (2019) proposes that Quingnam be considered a language isolate. Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia and Rita Eloranta-Barrera Virhuez (2019) believe that Quingnam may have been a variety of the same language as Sechura, an also-extinct language formerly spoken in the Sechura Desert in Piura Department, the two having been "split into two" by a "late arrival of the Mochica language".
Prior to the identification of Quingnam and its respective documentation, it was sometimes treated as a synonym or dialect of Mochica. Daniel Garrison Brinton, in his 1891 work The American Race, grouped the "Chimus", which he said were found "near Truxillo", within his "Yunca linguistic stock", alongside Mochica, Catacao and Colán, the latter two formerly found in the Department of Piura and subsumed under the label Tallán. Čestmír Loukotka and Paul Rivet, in their joint 1952 classification in the work Les Langues du Monde , classified Quingnam with Mochica in their "Mučik" family. Loukotka, in his independent 1968 classification, later listed the "Casma" and "Paramonga" dialects, which he claimed were historically spoken along the Casma River and Fortaleza River respectively in the Department of Ancash, as members of his "Chimuan" language family, which also included Mochica (which he called "Chimú"), the poorly known and extinct Cañari and Puruhá languages of Ecuador, as well as a number of supposed, undocumented languages in the same region; he further claimed that the name "Quingnam" was a synonym of Mochica. Norwegian linguist Even Hovdhaugen, in his grammar sketch of Mochica, speculated about the possibility of "Quignam" being related to Mochica, but erroneously claimed that "not a single word of Quignam has survived".
Quingnam and the lengua pescadora Fishermen along the Chimú coast were reported to have spoken a language called 'fisherman language' by Spanish missionaries, and disambiguated as by linguists; this is presumably the same as Quingnam. A report by Calancha indicates that Pescadora and Quingnam were the same language, but Pescadora was more "guttural". However, the designation has also referred to Mochica, entirely unrelated to Quingnam, as well, further confusing the designations. Willem Adelaar does not consider the issue of the lengua pescadora to be resolved. Eloranta (2020) believes that the term Pescadora was used as a cover term to designate all languages spoken in "maritime regions", such as "by the seashore, next to the sea, in the Pacific coast, at harbors", as opposed to the Yunga languages, spoken inland and far from the coastal areas. Rojas-Berscia and Eloranta (2019) propose that the lengua pescadora was a "general label" referring to both Quingnam as well as Sechura.
Phonology A few phonological aspects of Quingnam may be deduced from the highly limited data, namely presence of word-final stress, and allowance of consonants in the coda position, as evidenced by the word '6'. Colonial Spanish sources describe the language as more difficult than Mochica and of "obscure and of slippery pronunciation" according to Calancha.That which among them is called la Pescadora, more resembles a language for the stomach, than for understanding; it is clipped, rough-sounding, guttural, and surly; with these two most common languages the communication of the valleys was held, and the commerce and business dealings of these territories was conducted.
Consonants A number of sounds may be ascertained in Quingnam due to their relative incidence and corresponding phonetic values in Spanish. Among them are voiceless stops , , ; an affricate ; nasals , , ; two laterals, sometimes alternating with each other, and ; and an approximant . Two sibilants at different points of articulation also appear, one alveolar, similar in quality to and written as or , and the other palatal as , written . The sound written as alternates with and , making it more likely to be a tap rather than a trill . The sound may also be postulated based on orthgraphic alternations of sequences of , (where V represents a wildcard for any vowel) and , present in both proper names and lexical items. This sound may also be represented by and sometimes , which alternate orthographically with the above sequences. Quingnam toponyms are distinguished from Mochica toponyms by the absence of and the presence of . Indeed, there are very few toponyms in the Moche Valley which contain this letter. This may be due to a co-occurrence of Mochica and Quingnam in the area. In any case, the evidence for in Quingnam is very weak. The other letters representing fricatives are , , , and . The first three alternate with each other before the vowel , which could indicate their phonetic value as some sort of postalveolar or palatal fricative, such as or . In addition, alternates with in both the initial and medial position, and may have still represented the fricative at the time in Spanish writing.
A number of alternations are noticeable in various proper names. For example, can be found in a few instances alternating with , written as or , such as in the names ~ and ~. The latter is particularly notable as it implies that both and were present in the name, possibly even coarticulated as , pronounced as a simultaneous and . This sound is extremely rare in the world, but most notably occurs in Muisca, a Chibchan language. An extremely frequent alternation of nasals is with zero, the absence of a sound, most commonly in the word-final position and in word-internal clusters. This may indicate a nasalization of the preceding vowel; the letters and are interchangeable in this position, which is indicative of a lack of a precise place of articulation. Further alternations include and , particularly noteworthy because the two letters alternate in more than one token within the same form, such as in the name ~.
Voiced stops