The Quingnam language was a
pre-Columbian
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, ...
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 Valley. At the height of Chimú conquests, the language was spoken extensively from the
Jequetepeque River
Jequetepeque River is a river located north of the Chicama valley in the La Libertad Region in northern Peru. Its valley has agricultural resources where one of the main products is rice.
In the Jequetepeque valley archeological sites of the M ...
in the north, to the
Carabayllo (near present-day
Lima
Lima ( ; ), originally founded as Ciudad de Los Reyes (City of The Kings) is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín Rivers, in the desert zone of the central coastal part of ...
) 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 Quingnam language became extinct shortly after the arrival of the
conquistadors. The core Chimú city,
Chan Chan
Chan Chan was the largest city of the pre-Columbian era in South America. It is now an archaeological site in La Libertad Region west of Trujillo, Peru.
Chan Chan is located in the mouth of the Moche Valley and was the capital of the historic ...
, 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 (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
Quechua (, ; ), usually called ("people's language") in Quechuan languages, is an indigenous language family spoken by the Quechua peoples, primarily living in the Peruvian Andes. Derived from a common ancestral language, it is the most widel ...
.
See also
*
Chimú culture
References
{{reflist
Languages of Peru
Unclassified languages of South America