Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The Incas never developed writing to record the many oral languages used within their empire such as Quechua and Aymara. Their European conquerors first tran- scribed their words utilizing the Latin alphabet according to the sounds of letters in sixteenth-century Spanish. The Incas were first called the Yncas or Ingas. In the twentieth century modern Hispanicized spellings became standard. Since the 1970s there have been efforts to remove the Spanish influences from Quechua spellings resulting in the Inkas. However the process is not as simple as swapping letters. Compound words might be more accurately rendered separately. Glottalized stops and affricatives must be added. The word huaca a sacred Inca object is often rendered twak’a. Further research is needed for more difficult words such as an Inca town first written as Xaxuxa Xauxa and now Jauja. Many scholars have recently begun using these reformed spellings. This shift is absolutely consistent with the intellectual goals of this project which seeks to recover Inca bodies of knowledge that were lost in translation into Spanish concepts and epistemologies. However at present these new spellings can only be implemented incompletely and are often used inconsistently. In the digital age multiple spellings make it difficult to locate subjects through keyword searches negatively impacting scholarship. For example Sayhuite an archaeological site has been rendered Saywite as well as Sayhuiti Saihuite Sawite and Sahuite. Some scholars have intentionally used one spelling to refer to a culture and another for a place or the archaeological ruins of that culture adding further complication. (MP)