TURKISH SIMILAR WORDS IN QUECHUA CORPUS

Abstract

Quechua is a South American indigenous language, spoken by eight to twelve million people across six South American countries, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The theory of multi-wave migrations of Asian tribes through the Bering Straight inside the Americas, invoked academic studies to search for probable linguistic and cultural kinship between the languages of native peoples of Americas and the languages of Asian nations, such as Turkish, Mongolian and Indoiranian language families. The motivation for the present study was to investigate Quechuan living word inventory from the viewpoint of searching any probable correlation with Turkish Language. With this aim, a field-compiled three-dialectal dictionary of Quechuan Language by Parker (1964) was focused. The dictionary has been published as a fieldwork report resume: English-Quechua Dictionary- Cuzco, Ayacucho and Cochabamba. Having found a significant number of Turkish-sounding words with similar meanings, the author concludes that the living vocabulary of these three dialects of the Quechua carries evidence indicating the presence of a correlation with the languages of Turks in Asia. The findings are tabulated under the headlines in English, Quechuan and Turkish. The study is hoped to invoke further and more detailed similar works.