The Quingnam language was a
pre-Columbian language that was spoken by the Chimú people, who lived in the former territories of the Mochicas: an area north of the
Chicama Chao River
Chicama is a town in Northern Peru, capital of the district of Chicama of Ascope Province in the region La Libertad. This town is located beside the Pan-American Highway some 33 km north of Trujillo city in the agricultural Chicama Valley.
Se ...
Valley. At the height of Chimú conquests, the language was spoken extensively from the
Jequetepeque River in the north, to the
Carabayllo (near present-day
Lima) in the south.
Fishermen along the Chimú coast spoke a language called ''Lengua Pescadora'' (fisherman language) by Spanish missionaries, and disambiguated as Yunga Pescadora by linguists; this may be the same as Quingnam. A letter found during excavations at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the
El Brujo Archaeological Complex includes a list of decimal numerals which may be Quingnam or Pescadora, but they are not
Mochica
The Moche civilization (; alternatively, the Mochica culture or the Early, Pre- or Proto-Chimú) flourished in northern Peru with its capital near present-day Moche, Trujillo, Peru from about 100 to 700 AD during the Regional Development Epoch. ...
.
The Quingnam language became extinct shortly after the arrival of the
conquistador
Conquistadors (, ) or conquistadores (, ; meaning 'conquerors') were the explorer-soldiers of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires of the 15th and 16th centuries. During the Age of Discovery, conquistadors sailed beyond Europe to the Americas, O ...
s. The core Chimú city,
Chan Chan, was in the vicinity of the new Spanish city of Trujillo and became overwhelmed by it, with people needing to pick up the language of the conquerors for trade and survival.
Possible numerals
Below are numerals from an early 17th-century manuscript found at
Magdalena de Cao
Magdalena de Cao is a town in Northern Peru, capital of the district Magdalena de Cao of Ascope Province in the region La Libertad. This town is located some 56 km northwest of Trujillo city in the agricultural Chicama Valley.
See also
*Paijà ...
(Quilter et al. 2010,
[Quilter, Jeffrey. 2010]
Moche: archaeology, ethnicity, identity
''Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines'' 39(2): 225-241. as transcribed by Urban 2019
[Urban, Matthias. 2019. ]
Lost languages of the Peruvian North Coast
'. Estudios Indiana 12. Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Preußischer Kulturbesitz) & Gebr. Mann Verlag.). Although the manuscript does not indicate which language the numerals belong to, Quingnam is assumed to be the most likely candidate based on location and other clues:
:
The numerals ''tau'' (4), ''sut'' (6), ''canchen'' (7), and ''pachac'' (100) are loanwords from a variety of
Quechua II.
See also
*
Chimú culture
Chimor (also Kingdom of Chimor or Chimú Empire) was the political grouping of the Chimú culture. The culture arose about 900 AD, succeeding the Moche culture, and was later conquered by the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui around 1470, fifty y ...
References
{{reflist
Languages of Peru
Unclassified languages of South America