There was a professorial chair for the study of Quichua in the University of San Márcos at Lima, and the language was cultivated, during the two centuries after the conquest, as well by educated natives as by many Spanish ecclesiastics. The sermons of Dr. Don Fernando de Avendaño have already been referred to.[1320] Dr. Lunarejo, of Cuzco, was another famous Quichuan preacher, and the Confesionarios and catechisms in the language were very numerous. Bishop Louis Geronimo Oré, of Guamanga, in his ritualistic manual, gives the Lord’s prayer and commandments, not only in Quichua and Aymara, but also in the Puquina language spoken by the Urus on Lake Titicaca, and in the Yunca language of the coast, which he calls Mochica.[1321]
A very curious book was published at Lima in 1602, which, among other things, treats of the Quichua language and of the derivations of names of places. The author, Don Diego D’Avalos y Figueroa, appears to have been a native of La Paz. He was possessed of sprightly wit, was well read, and a close observer of nature. We gather from his Miscelanea Austral[1322] the names of birds and animals, and of fishes in Lake Titicaca, as well as the opinions of the author on the cause of the absence of rain on the Peruvian coast, on the lacustrine system of the Collao, and on other interesting points of physical geography.[1323]
In modern times the language of the Incas has received attention from students of Peruvian history. The joint authors, Dr. Von Tschudi and Don Mariano Eduardo de Rivero, in their work entitled Antigüedades Peruanas, published at Vienna in 1851, devote a chapter to the Quichua language. Two years afterwards Dr. Von Tschudi published a Quichua grammar and dictionary, with the text of the Inca drama of Ollantay, and other specimens of the language.[1324] The present writer’s contributions towards a grammar and dictionary of Quichua were published by Trübner in 1864, and a few years previously a more complete and elaborate work had seen the light at Sucre, the capital of Bolivia. This was the grammar and dictionary by Father Honorio Mossi, of Potosi, a large volume containing thorough and excellent work.[1325] Lastly a Quichua grammar by José Dionisio Anchorena was published at Lima in 1874.[1326]
The curious publication of Don José Fernandez Nodal in 1874 is not so much a grammar of the Quichua Language as a heterogeneous collection of notes on all sorts of subjects, and can scarcely take a place among serious works. The author was a native of Arequipa, of good family, but he was carried away by enthusiasm and allowed his imagination to run riot.[1327]
The gospel of St. Luke, with Aymara and Spanish in parallel columns, was translated from the vulgate by Don Vicente Pazos-kanki, a graduate of the University of Cuzco, and published in London in 1829;[1328] and more recently a Quichua version of the gospel of St. John, translated by Mr. Spilsbury, an English missionary, has appeared at Buenos Ayres.[1329] These publications and others of the same kind have a tendency to preserve the purity of the language, and are therefore welcome to the student of Incarial history.
Quichua has been the subject of detailed comparative study by more than one modern philologist of eminence. The discussion of the Quichua roots by the learned Dr. Vicente Fidel Lopez is a most valuable addition to the literature of the subject; while the historical section of his work is a great aid to a critical consideration of Montesinos and other early authorities. Whatever may be thought of his theoretical opinions, and of the considerations by which he maintains them, there can be no doubt that Dr. Lopez has rendered most important service to all students of Peruvian history.[1330] The theoretical identification of Quichuan roots with those of Turanian and Iberian languages, as it has been elaborated by Mr. Ellis, is also not without its use, quite apart from the truth or otherwise of any linguistic theory.[1331]
FROM TIMANÁ.
[After a cut in William Bollaert’s Antiquarian Researches, etc., p. 41, showing a stone figure from Timana in New Granada, an antiquity of the Muiscas, found in a dense forest, with no tradition attached.—Ed.]
Editorial labors connected with the publication of the text and of translations of the Inca drama of Ollantay have recently conduced, in an eminent degree, to the scholarly study of Quichua, while they have sensibly contributed to a better knowledge of the subject. Von Tschudi was the first to publish the text of Ollantay, in the second part of his Kechua Sprache, having given extracts from the drama in the chapter on the Quichua language in the Antigüedades Peruanas. After a long interval he brought out a revised text with a parallel German translation,[1332] from his former manuscript, collated with another bearing the date of La Paz, 1735.