1: Introduction: About Sounds and Spelling
Contents
Spelling, Regional Differences, and Solidarity
Spelling Quechua and Aymara: What Went Wrong?
Every Language Needs Its Own Spelling System
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Spelling: Sounds and Letters
There has been a great deal of confusion about how best to spell Quechua and Aymara. There are two main reasons for this, because there are two big and popular confusions about what spelling a language is really about.
The very first and most important thing to realise about writing a language is simple: a letter is not a sound. People constantly say things like “a language should be written how it sounds”, or “Spanish is pronounced as it is spelt”. These are very common beliefs, but taken literally, they are actually completely wrong. As we shall soon see, no language in the world is written exactly how it sounds; in fact trying to do this is never practical or helpful.
So, a letter is not a sound. Don’t believe us? Well try listening to this letter: c… Try again: c…
Well, did you hear anything? Of course not. Because like any letter, c is simply a symbol, a ‘drawing’, it is not a sound. Now you may have imagined or ‘read’ a sound in your head, but in fact different readers will have thought of different sounds: some of you will have thought of the [s] sound, the first one in centre; others will have though of the [k] sound, the first one in car. But whichever you might have ‘thought’ you heard, in fact you actually heard nothing. All you did was interpret a symbol, and this one same symbol can be interpreted as more than one different sound. This is the key to what spelling and reading are: interpreting symbols as representing sounds.
So let’s get this one thing straight right from the start: letters and spelling are not sounds. Spelling is actually about representing sounds indirectly. It is really about everyone just agreeing on certain rules for how to read, rules that tell you which symbols (‘letters’) are read or pronounced as which sounds. You know plenty of rules for Spanish, like the reading rule that same letter <c> or <z> represents different sounds depending on the other letters around it, and also depending on the region you come from. We’ll see more about what these rules are like a little later.
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Spelling, Regional Differences, and Solidarity
So the second big confusion to avoid is this: spelling a language is not about exact pronunciation. It simply cannot be, because people from different regions have slightly different pronunciations, but they all spell the same. Think about it with Spanish. If all people who spoke Spanish around the world tried to spell “exactly how they pronounce”, we would end up with a complete mess. Some people would write things like yámame, llámame, shámame, dyámame, and so on, depending on where they came from. And if many people wrote exactly how they pronounced, they would not write cinco cervezas. Why not sinko serbesas? But no, if we all do this and try to “spell exactly how we pronounce” in our own region, then the only result is that everybody, in all regions, loses out. Spelling chaos for everyone. This is why everybody across the world makes an effort to learn to spell Spanish almost identically wherever they come from, and however they pronounce it. The same goes for English all across the world. And it should be true as far as possible in Quechua and Aymara too.
As you will already be realising then, spelling is not simply about “spelling every sound with the same letter all the time”. In fact spelling is never like this, because that approach is actually far too simplistic and it just doesn’t work well at all.
For any language, spelling needs to be cleverer than that, and it needs some rules. Above all, these rules have to be faithful to the specific, individual nature of each single language. The spelling and reading rules that work for one language will not necessarily work well for a different language, especially if those languages have sound systems that are very different to each other: like Spanish and Quechua (or Aymara).
What spelling is really about, then, is finding a spelling system that is at least fairly close to the pronunciation, close enough to be easy to use. But importantly it also has to be a unified system, i.e. one that has been deliberately designed bearing in mind the different pronunciations that are used in many different regions, in order to find the spelling system that provides the best compromise for people from all regions, so that they can all be consistent with each other in always spelling the same word the same way, even if they pronounce it slightly differently depending on where exactly they come from.
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Spelling Quechua and Aymara: What Went Wrong?
Everyone knows that there have been big problems in working out a spelling system that everyone agrees on for the Andean languages. There are two main reasons. First, most people in the Andes have learnt to read and write Spanish first, and don’t realise that if we are to respect Quechua and Aymara as so different to Spanish, then they need a completely different spelling system of their own. So please, forget your Spanish habits, and don’t immediately ‘complain’ that it’s ‘too complicated’ if for Quechua or Aymara you’re asked to consider a different spelling rule to the one you learned in school for Spanish. Quechua or Aymara are different languages, so of course they need different spelling rules; so please be ready and open to new spelling rules if that is what your native language calls for!
The second main problem has been regionalism and a lack of solidarity. Many people have either not realised that others who speak their language in different areas do not always pronounce words the same, or they have just insisted that ‘only’ their own region pronounces all words ‘properly’. As we have seen clearly on our Origins and Diversity of Quechua page, though, no region can claim that they alone speak the uniquely ‘correct’ Quechua, it’s simply wrong and arrogant to think so. So to start with, the first important thing is for people to realise how pronunciations differ from region to region. We hope that Sounds of the Andean Languages will help in precisely this.
What has happened up to now is that sadly, in most areas people insist that they only accept to spell Quechua or Aymara as they want to, according exactly to the local pronunciations in their region only. The inevitable result has been incoherence and a big, big mess that has held back the Andean languages for decades.
The only solution is for people to understand and respect the differences, and come to some agreement on the best common way of spelling, so that everyone can spell words in the same way, whatever their regional pronunciations. And yes, this means you too, whatever region you come from! You are asked to be ready to make some little sacrifices to achieve the solution and the spelling that works best for the largest number of people, for the sake of solidarity in Quechua and Aymara. To find out exactly how you can help in this – which is very easy! – read on...
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Sounds and Symbols
Back to the sounds vs. letters problem. There’s actually no particularly simple way, then, to represent sounds on paper. To help in this, though, specialists in linguistics have devised some extra symbols like č, ĉ, š, ŕ, λ, χ, and so on, which you may have already seen in our word comparison tables. Here we write these special sound symbols (‘phonetic symbols’) always [like this], inside [brackets] and in green ink. If you want to hear recordings of exactly which sound each symbol represents, we have a useful table of them all if you click here – but then please be patient for a minute while the sound files load in your computer.
Those symbols are for sounds, then. When writing, though, in practice there’s actually no point even trying to write all the different sounds that you get in different regional accents. When you write Spanish you always spell <cerveza> and <llámame>, wherever you come from, and whatever exact sounds you pronounce in your particular region. So special phonetic symbols are not to be used for everyday practical spelling, but only if for some special purposes we want to show more exactly how a word is pronounced in one particular region, so [serbesa] and [λámame] for the pronunciation in Cuzco, for example, but [θerbeθa] or [yámame] for most of Spain.
Notice this important difference then: spellings are not sounds, so we use normal purple letters inside <little arrows> for <spellings>, and green symbols inside brackets [ ] only for very precise [pronunciations].
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About the Alphabet
The alphabet used by most languages in the world was originally designed for Latin, a language spoken two thousand years ago by the Romans. What this means is that this alphabet was actually first designed for the sound system of Latin – i.e. for the particular sounds that Latin used to make differences in meaning. Things have changed so much in two thousand years and in different languages that this old Latin alphabet is not actually perfect for other, modern languages, such as Spanish or English. This is why there are now complications in Spanish spellings, like all of these:
• You spell <j> in <jerga> but <g> in <gemelos>, different symbols when the sound is exactly the same.
• Sometimes it’s the other way around, the same letter for two different sounds. The letter <c>, for example, is used twice in the word <cocer>, but for two completely different sounds, first [k] and then [s], i.e. [koser]. (In fact in Spain it’s different again, [k] and then [θ].)
• You spell <cervezas> with three different letters <c>, <z> and <s>, all for the same [s] sound in most accents in Latin America (but not in Spain, of course).
• You use two different letters <b> and <v> in <botar> and <votar>, but most people now pronounce these with the same sound.
And so on. This is why some people have problems in spelling Spanish according to the accepted norms, because they many not match pronunciations in their particular region, but of course everyone still tries to learn those norms, because everyone everywhere else is using them. In any case, for spelling Quechua or Aymara it is best to avoid these problems altogether, by following these much simpler rules instead:
• Never use the letter <c> on its own at all, nor the complicated <qui> and <que>. Just use <k> and <s> as appropriate. Only ever use <c> within the sequence <ch>.
• It’s much better also to abandon the strange Spanish spellings <hu> and <gu>, as in <huaca> or <guaca>, and use just <w> like most other languages: <waka>.
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Every Language Needs Its Own Spelling System
As you’ll be realising by now, every language has its own, different sound system. It is because the Spanish sound system is now so different to the Latin one that the original Latin letters are not necessarily well suited to Spanish any more. The Quechua and Aymara sound systems are much more different still, different from both Latin and Spanish. So neither the Latin alphabet, nor the Spanish way of using it, are very suitable for the Andean languages.
This is why Quechua and Aymara need a different way of writing, and different reading rules, from Spanish: there is simply no way to find a useful, practical alphabet for the Andean languages if we do not respect that these languages are different, and so for some sounds and letters we will have to use spelling rules that are very different from the ones you may be used to for Spanish. At first sight it might look simplest to write them like Spanish, but in practice it never works well.
Just think about it: every language in the world uses its own spelling system, designed for that language. If you’ve ever tried learning any other
language, like English, French, German, Italian, or any other, one of the first
things you have to learn is that each of them use letters differently, and many
letters stand for completely different sounds to the ones you’re used to in
Spanish. The same letter <j>
is pronounced [χ] in Spain, [h] in Latin
America, [ž] in French (je),
[dž]
in English (jet), and [y] in German (ja)!
Just like those languages, Quechua and Aymara too need their own spelling systems. If you really want to respect Quechua and Aymara, this means accepting that just because you may have learnt and practiced a lot in writing and reading ‘the language of the conquistadors’, the way that Spanish is written is by no means “the only way” to spell any language! You will need a little open-mindedness, and you should be ready to learn a new spelling system more appropriate for Quechua, for example, precisely because Quechua is not Spanish!
Take just one example. Aymara, and the Quechua of Cuzco, Puno and Bolivia, all have six sounds [k], [kh], [k’], [q], [qh] and [q’], and the differences between all of these are very important because they can make for different words with different meanings. Latin had only one of these six sounds ([k]), so Latin’s alphabet simply does not have enough different letters for the Quechua and Aymara sounds. Spanish does not have these sounds either. This is why to spell Aymara, and the southern varieties of Quechua, of course you need to spell things differently to Spanish: in this case you need to use the symbols <h> and <’>, in combination with the letters [k] and [q].
So Quechua has its own sound system, with its own pronunciation rules, different to Spanish; so too does Aymara. This means that the best way to spell the Andean languages is not the same as the best way to spell Spanish! Of course, we can keep to the same letters and sounds wherever possible, such as with <m> or <l> or even <ll>. But we certainly can’t do this in all cases, because the languages are just too different. Let’s respect that, even if it means a different spelling system to Spanish.
We recommend that you now click to go on to
section 2, on: Three Vowels or Five?