From the QuechuaLanguage home page, http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~barry/quechua/ :
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- Quechua ("qheshwa") is an indigenous language of the Andean region, spoken today by approximately 13 million people in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Northern Chile, Argentina, and Southern Colombia. It was the official language of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire.
Qhespita mihuyta atani, mana onqoychiwanchu:
I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me.
The most notable features of Quechua are: SOV WordOrder (verb at the end), very regular grammar (to the point that you might be forgiven if you mistake Quechua for a ConLang). Almost uniquely among American languages, Quechua has almost no inflections or similar morphological changes.
In common with many other American languages Quechua has:
- Long compound words which express ideas that require entire phrases on other languages.
- Complex kinship terms, which depend in part on the gender of both persons (e.g. a woman's sister is referred to by a different word than a man's sister, even if the sister in both cases is the same person).
- Grammatical distinction between exclusive and inclusive "we".
- Exclusive and inclusive of whom? The listener--i.e. "we" meaning "me, you, and possibly some others" and "we" meaning "me, a few others, but not you"?
- Large inventory of consonant phonemes, including aspirated and glottalized stops, but relatively few vowels (/u/ and /o/ are allophones, for example).
Quechua has been proposed as a solution to some WikiGrammar problems.
Famous speakers include Greedo the bounty hunter (but that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away).
http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/greedo/?id=bts
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