this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
94 points (94.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers
4 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Example

Additionally, the example link above is a hyperlink to the permalink of a comment, but it doesn't work. Any idea on how to link to a comment?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Zompist has a nice page with small facts about the language; for something a bit deeper Langfocus gives it a rather good introduction. I'll mention some bits but keep in mind that I don't speak it, nor live anywhere close to speakers.

It's mostly associated with the Inca empire. But even after the Spanish conquest of the Andes, the language has 7~10 million speakers; alongside Guarani it's one of the two "big" native languages of South America.

I'm not sure however if I should be calling it "language" or "languages"; there's a bunch of Quechuan varieties, and some might argue that they're related but already distinct languages.

Some years ago some PhD student made into the news for actually defending her PhD thesis in Quechua, instead of shifting it to Spanish.

A few other tidbits of info, applying to most Quechua varieties:

Only three vowels - /a i u/. They're typically pronounced as the ones in "bat", "bit" and "book", but this varies considerably. On the other hand it has quite a bit of consonants, Cusco Quechua for example has 26 (or 30 if counting /f b d g/, from Spanish loanwords).

Words are mostly built from blocks, as in Turkish or Finnish. And just like Finnish it relies quite a bit on suffixes, so they can get quite long. For example, the word for "dog" can be simply allqu (nominative [subject], singular) or something like "allqukunapaq" (benefactive, plural - roughly "for the sake of my dogs"; -kuna- is the plural and -paq the case mark). On the other hand you typically use less words per sentence; for example it barely uses adpositions and particles.

There are different words for we = I+you (inclusive "we") and we = I+someone else (exclusive "we"). Not that you're going to see them a lot; the verb conjugation is usually enough, so pronouns can be dropped entirely.

The evidentials are actually a big deal, and the difference between people taking your bullshit for irony or for you being a liar. If we were to emulate this in English:

  • "The Moon is made of green cheese, I can attest it" - yeah nah bullshit
  • "The Moon is made of green cheese, I guess" - note how it implies some irony

...except that I had to use full sentences to do this in English. If English had Quechua-like evidentials you'd simply plop -mi and -chra after "The Moon" and call it a day.