3. The Puquinas.

The Puquinas are also known under the names Urus or Uros, Hunos and Ochozomas. They formerly lived on the islands and shores of Lake Titicaca, in the neighborhood of Pucarini, and in several villages of the diocese of Lima. Oliva avers that some of them were found on the coast near Lambayeque.[313] If this is correct, they had doubtless been transported there by either the Incas or the Spanish authorities. They are uniformly spoken of as low in culture, shy of strangers and dull in intelligence. Acosta pretends that they were so brutish that they did not claim to be men.[314] Garcilasso de la Vega calls them rude and stupid.[315] Alcedo, writing in the latter half of the eighteenth century, states that those on the islands had, against their will, been removed to the mainland, where they dwelt in gloomy caves and in holes in the ground covered with reeds, and depended on fishing for a subsistence.

They are alleged to have been jealous about their language, and unwilling for any stranger to learn it. Their religious exercises were conducted in Kechua, with which they were all more or less acquainted. The only specimen of their tongue in modern treatises is the Lord’s Prayer, printed by Hervas and copied by Adelung.[316] On it Hervas based the opinion that the Puquina was an independent stock. The editors of the “Mithridates” seemed to incline to the belief that it was related to the Aymara, and this opinion was fully adopted by Clement L. Markham, who pronounced it “a very rude dialect of the Lupaca,”[317] in which he was followed by the learned Von Tschudi.[318]

None of these authorities had other material than the Pater Noster referred to. Hervas credits it to a work of the missionary Geronimo de Ore, which it is evident that neither he nor any of the other writers named had ever seen, as they all speak of the specimen as the only printed example of the tongue. This work is the Rituale seu Manuale Peruanum, published at Naples in 1607. It contains about thirty pages in the Puquina tongue, with translations into Aymara, Kechua, Spanish and Latin, and thus forms a mine of material for the student. Though rare, a copy of it is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and is thus readily accessible. I have published a number of extracts from its Puquina renderings in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for 1890. They are sufficient to show that while this language borrowed many terms, especially those referring to religion and culture, from the neighboring Kechua and Aymara dialects, these were but additions to a primitive stock fundamentally different from either of them.

The dissimilarity of the three tongues is well seen in their numerals, which are as follows:

KECHUA.AYMARA.PUQUINA.
One,huc,mayni,pesc.
Two,iscay,pani,so.
Three,quimsa,quimsa,capa.
Four,tahua,pusi,sper.
Five,pichka,pisca,tacpa.
Six,soccta,chocta,chichun.
Seven,canchis,pa-callco,stu.
Eight,pusacc,quimsa-callco,quina.
Nine,iscon,llalla-tunca,checa.
Ten,chunca,tunca,scata.

In these lists the Aymara numerals, one, two and four are independent; three, five, six and ten are taken from the Kechua; and the remaining three are compound, pa-callco, being 2+5; quimsa-callco, 3+5; and llalla-tunca meaning “less than ten.” Callco is derived from the word for “foot,” the counting being with the toes. On the other hand, there is not a single numeral in the Puquina which can be derived from either Kechua or Aymara; and what is more remarkable, there is apparently not one which is compounded.

It remains puzzling to me why the Puquina, which seems to have been spoken only by a few wretched villagers about Lake Titicaca, should have been classed by writers in the sixteenth century as one of the lenguas generales of Peru. Not only does Ore refer to it by this term, but in one of the official Relaciones Geograficas written in 1582, it is mentioned as “one of the three general languages of this kingdom.”[319] This would seem to indicate that at that period it had a wider extension than we can now trace.