An acoustic study of the synchronic correspondences of the palatal lateral ∗/λ/ of proto-quechua in the quechua of Chachapoyas

© 2020 Universidad Nacional de Colombia, , Department of Linguistics. All rights reserved. An issue that is still controversial in diachronic studies of Quechua is whether proto-Quechua had a palatal lateral, ∗/λ/, as suggested by Torero (1964) and Parker (2013), or whether, on the contrary, it was a palatalized lateral, ∗/lj/, as argued by Quesada-Castillo (1978, 1988). The article provides an acoustic study of the synchronic correspondences of that segment in the Quechua of Chachapoyas, spoken in the districts of Granada, Olleros, and Colcamar (department of Amazonas, northeast of the Peruvian Andes). The results obtained support Taylor's proposal (1994, 2000) regarding the dialectal differences in this variety of Quechua, and also indicate the presence of synchronic reflexes such as a preocclusive palatal lateral, [dλ], a weak variant of the voiced palatal affricate, [d3], as well as the unvoiced [d3], which had not been previously reported in the literature. In view of these results, the study concludes that there is no evidence in favor of a palatalized lateral in proto-Quechua, but that there is a possibility that the proto-phoneme in Chachapoyan Quechua could have been a pre-occlusive palatal lateral, ∗/dλ/.