300px, in the Bishopric of Trujillo, the '' city of Trujillo'' is shown as the main representative place of this language
The Quingnam language was a
pre-Columbian
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...
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 in the north, to the
Carabayllo (near present-day
Lima
Lima ( ; ), founded in 1535 as the Ciudad de los Reyes (, Spanish for "City of Biblical Magi, Kings"), is the capital and largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón River, Chillón, Rímac River, Rímac and Lurín Rive ...
) 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
conquistador
Conquistadors (, ) or conquistadores (; ; ) were Spanish Empire, Spanish and Portuguese Empire, Portuguese colonizers who explored, traded with and colonized parts of the Americas, Africa, Oceania and Asia during the Age of Discovery. Sailing ...
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.
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 as it is 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 (, ), also called (, 'people's language') in Southern Quechua, is an indigenous language family that originated in central Peru and thereafter spread to other countries of the Andes. Derived from a common ancestral " Proto-Quechua" l ...
.
See also
*
Chimú culture
References
{{South American languages
Languages of Peru
Unclassified languages of South America